ARTIST STATEMENT
Henri Tauliaut and Annabel Guérédrat speak of their universes, their three worlds. Annabel Guérédrat, above all, is a choreographer, dancer-performer; Henri Tauliaut is a sculptor who primarily considers himself as a digital artist.
Our individual interrogations are similar; we question domination as well as our personal and collective mythologies with art. Notions of post-identity, of porosity, mangrovaire, and queer identity are also common themes in our work. Our creations are hybrides (hybrid), existing between living and visual art forms such as installation, performance, video, ritual, and somatic practices.
As a duo, we create productions in natural and urban landscapes that are charged with historic or symbolic value. By exposing our bodies in fusion we question the nature of coupling, the relationship between man and woman, and the boundaries of the binomial. This fusion attempts to revisit the political and cultural terrain of the Caribbean by casting a critical eye toward the insular, néo-apartheid (better known as “creole”) society here in Martinique.
We are two performers who question porosity as it exists in nature and between humans. For this reason, we try to create intimate performances that are participatory. We want the public to become engaged spectators.
With the Caribbean and the Americas as our artistic terrain, we approach art as a way to interrogate and transgress social codes and taboos within this geography.
We created three worlds to explore these ideas: le monde Aqua, le monde Iguana, and le monde Afro-Punk.
« Le monde Aqua »
This is a world of embryonic sensations. This world is aquatic, ludic, and full of light. Our bodies are landscapes that we offer as objects for voyeurs. It is good to be in fusion, to disappear into another body. We merge with nature. Fusing with a partner and fusing with nature creates a new body.
« Le monde Iguana »
This is where we – as a couple – become a spectacle. We perform in places that aren’t meant for such performances: outside of a Catholic Mass, a public bar, a hair salon. Onlookers at these sites become our spectators; each person becomes a Master of Ceremonies at our performances. Our costumes cover us from head to toe, so we are anonymous and speechless. Our faces are not identifiable. We are without words and without an identifiable skin color. In the public spaces where we’ve performed, spectators have had the desire to touch us, to protect us, to feed us, to walk with us. They look at us with empathy. Our performative movements are extremely slow; the effect is near an immobility that forces people to notice us. According to spectators, we have become “beautiful,” “wise,” “angels,” “living sculpture.”
« Le monde Afro-Punk »
Here we conjure Carnival to highlight taboos and then break them. We take up the energy of Carnival season’s jours gras to express what is hidden and encrypted in daily life. This tradition of carnivalesque parody is important because it allows us to decrypt and transgress everything. We decipher and critique codes of domination and coupling in the Antillean society.
Original text in French by Henri Tauliaut and Annabel Guérédrat, May 2016
Translated from the French by Yasmine Espert
BIOGRAPHIES
HENRI TAULIAUT
I define myself as an artist of Bio-Art and Digital Arts. For fifteen years, I have been developing an approach around the thematic of living and artificial things. I’m interested in the link between art and science as well as the question of life, its complexity, its beauty, its extraordinary profusion and its banality. Each project attempts to highlight an issue and is supposed to generate new information. I presented the third version of the Jungle Sphere at the Havana Biennial in May 2015. This sculptural series begun in 2010 and originated from the reflections of the project D.E.V.A.H.
Artist's website: henritauliaut.wix.com/jungle-sphere
ANNABEL GUÉRÉDRAT
Annabel Guérédrat is certified in literature and history from the Universite of Sorbonne. She has a background in dance and somatic techniques. Between 2010 and 2015, Annabel travelled all around the world with her first performance : A freak show for S. Annabel then opened a new cycle of performances and conferences around black feminism. These events considered the social and politic body of black and mixed-race women between the Caribbean and Europe. Preoccupied with the question of post-identity, she created Valeska and you with the drummer Franck Martin and three new series of performances with Henri Tauliaut, a visual artist from Guadalupe (« A smell of success 2015 », « success is success 2016 » and « sun of success 2017»).
Artist's website:
www.artincidence.fr
