Guillaume Adjutor Provost
SLOW READERS, argument n°1

My art explores social, historical, and familial links through pictorial structures, tools and performance acts, converging place, action, material and time, which catalyzes an exchange from inhabitant to participant and utilizes precise gestures and rhizomatic metaphors. My work elaborates on new connections between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ and is compulsively led by my need to reconfigure borders and identities.

Every performance that I have presented is based on the idea of what is lost in reconstitution. I am interested in how a subjective interpretation of a historical or familial event can be transformed into an abstracted, conceptualized piece of work. My performances are intimate scenes and are influenced by the context of their creation, whether it is through the relationship that I share with a public or through an intimate, individual interaction.

The performance SLOW READERS, argument n°1 relates to the hidden messages that we can find within spiritual lyrics from the mid 19th century. I take as an example the song “Steal Away to Jesus” composed by Wallace Willis around 1862. That song represents how the spiritual aspect was abstractly coded for the purpose of clandestine communication. I wish to investigate these residual fragments of communication through nervous gesture and minimal voice interplay.