Brûler | Jorge León Claron McFadden Simone Aughterlony

How do works of art, be they visual, literary or musical, relate conceptually to the question of finitude?

The planet is burning. If Lucy - the 3,200,000-year-old Australopithecus discovered in the Ethiopian desert in 1974 - came back, what would she say? In Brûler, her voice – conveyed through artists – will come to life on a stage where master glassmakers are seen at work, using their breath and molten silica – to create anthropomorphic forms. 3D printers produce synthetic bones. Blocks of clay stand awaiting excavation. The stage is a vast evolutionary laboratory where the work gradually unfolds its aim: to summon the past in order to question the present, to light the flame of a future that is searching for itself in a world whose end is constantly being announced. Together, to burn with a new fire.

Genesis

The idea of Brûler came about during the The End Of Death conference at Bozar in 2019. I was invited there to share my experience as director of the film Before We Go (2018) created with artists and people at the end of life. I mentioned, among other things, the extent to which the Western narrative is driven by the question of the end. How are works of art, be they visual, literary or musical conceived in relation to the notion of finitude? It was there that I met Aubrey de Grey, an ideologue of transhumanism who basically told the audience: “The end of the end is only a matter of time. Death is just a disease that will eventually be cured. The human being who will live to be 400 years old has already been born. He may be among us, in the audience.”

Beyond the scientistic vision promoted by transhumanists, and which is ultimately just the umpteenth version of a regularly rehashed story, what particularly challenged me was the collision between the fantasy of immortal life and the alarming daily announcement warnings we receive about humanity’s extinction. It is precisely this paradox that inspired my work. It has already generated a series of phases that I would like to now bring together in the context of the piece Brûler, starting with the figure of Lucy. Admittedly, Lucy is but an incomplete skeleton, an architecture of fossil bones and air. But it is precisely this lack, the poetics of absence that allows us to give body and voice to Lucy. A way of also materializing the fantasy of our origins. A way to further question our own finitude that we share with all living beings. And above all, our desire to transcend it.

Première 12.09.2024
Performances 12.09.2024 > 15.09.2024 at Les Halles de Schaerbeek
In search of coproduction partners

Download

Presentation pack · brûler · 2024-2025 · en PDF 1.3 MB

Dramaturgical note

Disimmortalize

The relationship to immortality naturally led me to explore the context of the museum, a space that is both concrete and symbolic and in which the works and objects preserved are intended to survive us. The 52 bones belonging to Lucy spent time in museums before being withdrawn from public view for conservation reasons. Immortalizing a work, preserving it in museum spaces entails, paradoxically, freezing it in time. Museums are places where works are reified, where they acquire a symbolic value, become untouchable.

In Brûler, the main dramatic arc unfolds concretely on the stage. Between, on the one hand, a space on the ground covered with earth - both an excavation field from which materials and shapes are extracted and a workshop where Lucy's face and body are shaped. And on the other hand, a space with an immaculate floor, a white cube where the elements collected and manufactured in the first space are exhibited, where living bodies are also exhibited which disturb the reified and untouchable logic of the museum.

The public moves freely throughout the places where the activity is carried out. Gradually, the sanitized exhibition space is contaminated by the organic elements of the excavation field / workshop where the earth is probed in search of traces of origins but also of the riches to be extracted. And where, from sand and clay, we create new forms, both human and non-human.

The living experience of creation thus comes to deconstruct the immortality of "dead" museum objects, in the spirit of the "post-museum" proposed by Françoise Vergès in her book Programme de désordre absolu : décoloniser le musée (2023): no longer the site of a supposedly neutral and universal heritage but a utopia...

(... ) which would awaken the senses, let the imagination and the dream unfold, where one could be inspired by collective or individual creations, rituals and gestures that offer other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world.
— Françoise Vergès, 2023

So I imagine a huge immersion space for the public. In other words, many actions unfold simultaneously on a stage that is open to people wandering about. Like a museum in a black box, there is no hierarchy, nor division between the space of the audience seating and the stage.

How do works of art, be they visual, literary or musical, relate conceptually to the question of finitude?

Genesis

Download

Dramaturgical note

Disimmortalize

Touring

Information

Cast