Traum (the paradox of v.) SMITH & Matthieu Barbin

A cross between a cosmic fable and a neomythological cyborg, this piece by SMITH and Matthieu Barbin follows the transformations a body undergoes after being pulverized in space—a spectacular disembodiment.

TRAUM, Le Paradoxe de V. is about the metamorphoses an astronaut undergoes from the moment of his death through his transformation into a constellation. Drawing on first-person accounts of near-death experiences, philosophical writings and quantum physics, it represents a marriage of the power of a complex imaginary and the nihilist poetry of action. The polymorphic artist and filmmaker SMITH has been working on a cross-disciplinary project since 2015. It incorporates a film short, a book, 3D prints, photos and reconstituted archives. This visual ensemble is organized around a retro-futurist story that borrows from Soviet aesthetics, science fiction and astronautics. Its title, TRAUM, links the question of dreams (the title means dream in German) to the phenomenon of traumatic accidents through the story of Yevgeni, a spacecraft launch operator suffering from narcolepsy, unintentionally responsible for an explosion that destroyed the Soyuz space shuttle and the death of his best friend, the shuttle’s pilot, Vlad. Haunted by the memory of the accident, he undergoes a long process of metamorphoses, while, mirroring this development, Vlad hybridizes with the debris from his vessel and eventually becomes an astral constellation. Through SMITH’s collaboration with dancer Matthieu Barbin, a choreographic dimension has been added to the project, focused on the moment of Vlad’s catasterization, his transformation into stars. Through a minimalist dance correlated with the science fiction register of the narrative, Barbin interrogates the forms of a limit-body taken to the threshold of its viability: what is produced by an organism when it is no longer living? How can living matter resist its own eradication? PARADOXICAL MATTER This piece’s central paradox is that it imagines a negative transformation, what philosopher Catherine Malabou calls destructive plasticity, i.e., the formation of an identity by elimination, obtained by erasure or an explosion. A term she uses to designate identi-

ties produced by brain damage, degeneration or cerebral lesions, here it is a conceptual operator to consider the way a traumatic event can produce an unrecognizable body, and to tell a story about this ontological outflow. Making use of futurist realism and physics, SMITH and Barbin have sought to understand the nature of matter that survives its own dissolution. They make particular reference to a principal of quantum mechanics which states that the location of subatomic particles cannot be determined as a point, only as a field of probability of their presence. Thus this dance piece is driven by a desire to “render an absence paradoxically present,” as they explain, to meld the physicality of the body and the evanescence of its movements and translate these actions in a “vectorial” space where a body can be said to be in different places and states at the same time. SMITH and Barbin worked with Matthieu Prat to conceive the stage design, subsequently revisited by Marion Abeille, with lighting by Fabrice Ollivier. The set is meant to be kind of landing dock for this differentiated identity. Entirely black and white, it is made up of two monolithic sculptures, two doors opening onto a corridor and accentuating the depth of the stage, along with dispersed geometric fragments representing the shuttle’s debris. This minimal landscape creates interacting correspondences between the finitude of the body and the infinity of the universe; the scattering of its elements resonates with the pulverization of Vlad’s body and the shattering of his psyche; and the variations of lighting between glare and obscurity render tangible the dialectic between the universe’s black holes described by astrophysics and the psychic black holes dealt with in trauma theory. INDETERMINATE LOGIC Entangled with this de-realized world is the indeterminacy of the body. Gender-neutral from the start, (the dancer’s androgyny is augmented by cross-dressing accessories such as elevator shoes), and no less neutralized in terms of his senses (he appears with his eyes covered by meat bandages), Vlad experiences a devitalized body and psyche as if both were emptied of their substance. The process of sculpting this body as it gradually loses its human attributes leads it to take a hybrid form, flesh contaminated by artifice when it absorbed the scraps of the spaceship. The dance itself oscillates between abstract compositions and reminders of a carnal past, like in the sequence where Barbin libidinously rubs up against a subwoofer, or when he caresses a dress made of stardust as if it were a fetish piece. Made of unpainted and cold materials (metal, black wood, neon and LED lights), the stage set intensifies the performance’s cold sensuality. The lighting, reflected on the surface of the body that is slowly revealed, supports the dramaturgy. Reinforced by the techno bass sound of Victoria Lukas, an electro composition alternates intoxicating melodies, chants, poetry and floating layers of sound, its numerous contrasts converge until our perception becomes disturbed. Onstage she establishes an authoritarian atmosphere and an urgency to which the dancer submits, his abrupt variations directly affecting the unfolding of the action. The music acts as the dancer’s ineffable double, sometimes a partner and accomplice and at others a threatening adversary. The text material used, a sibylline prose co-written with Lucien Raphmaj, ends up making the whole ensemble enigmatic and turning the choreography into a meticulously orchestrated poetry of incertitude. DEPROGRAMMED OBSOLESCENCE At death’s door, Vlad’s body goes from its larval state at the beginning to a flow no longer directly connected to the concrete world. Disarticulated and defuncti onalized, it experiences an obsolescence whose corporal expressions are like programming bugs, failed and aborted movements. Alone onstage, a human lump runs up against the real like a traumatized person who cannot deal with their condition. The repetition, central to the whole piece, becomes a formal representation of this ontological stuttering, from syncopation to the trance of a whirling dervish and a death wish. It produces the differentiation, drives the corporeal motions and organizes the transformations. To illustrate the disintegration produced by repetition, throughout the performance Barbin reiterates and distorts the same repertory of physical movements. This is particularly evident in the scene where Vlad receives exterior commands (“revert,” “analyze,” “catalyze,” “dodge,” etc.), at first transposed into highly stylized figures, the movements changing from iteration to iteration, until they are reduced to kinetic fragments, vestiges of a body that has demonstrated the principle of irreversibility. In rhythm with the dying light and sound, at times this danse macabre seems like a desperate ritual, an appeal whose outcome is highly uncertain. As wild children of their time, with Le Paradoxe de V. SMITH and Barbin have created a dense and detailed dance in phase with the uncertainties of their era. With its air of techno-romantic delirium, it constitutes a felt response to the transhumanist threat and the paradoxes of a world that, although undergoing obsolescence, remains open to hybrid futures.

SMITH Née en 1985. Vit et travaille à Paris. 2014 Spectrographies, pavillon Vendôme, Clichy ; Löyly, Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finlande ; Hors Pistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris 2016 Spectrographies & Traum, galerie Les filles du calvaire, Paris 2017 PAR/ICI, CCN, Montpellier

Matthieu Barbin Né en 1989. Vit et travaille à Paris. 2014 Interprète dans Levée des conflits, Enfant, et Manger de Boris Charmatz 2016 CAVERN, en collaboration avec Alix Eynaudi et Louise Hémon, Lafayette Anticipation, Paris