Looking for the East

Curator: Zuzana Jakalová
Opening: 19 January, 7 pm 
Exhibition duration: 19 January – 19 February 2017 
Artist: Gaëlle Cressent

Music and visual art have always attempted, by accompanying or telescoping, to re-define the limits of their respective domains. And it is indeed the question of limit, territory that poses the artist Gaëlle Cressent with the visual installation and sound called Looking for the East.

At the same time homage and transposition in the field of contemporary art, Looking for the East refers to the movement Traveler Techno born in the '90s in England and which has constantly sought new places of expression, new free territories by creating ephemeral spaces, heterotopias in the "Foucaldian" sense where the system would be overthrown, where the society of the spectacle would be abolished and where only the sound would bring together a common goal. According to Derrida quoting Rousseau "The spectator, giving himself as a show, is no longer voyeur or voyeur. The difference between the represented and the representative is deleted."
Places without place, a fragile utopia. Often illegal, these gatherings have always sought to link land-use agreements with landowners. In spite of these precautions, the repression did not cease interrupting them and the Czech Republic was the terrible theater in 2005 of a massive deployment of the forces of the order to stop the teknival CzechTek.

In the form of a micro event given on the evening of the vernissage, the artist plunges us back into the techno culture she discovered in the mid-90s in France, realizing a scene inspired by the Free Party. Columns of loudspeakers are the basis of an open sculpture in the midst of which the viewer moves and becomes in turn, thanks to sets of soft mirrors responding to sounds, an integral part of the room. Responding to frames stretched with mirrors, other panels of blue cows covered in part with land and sand, a sort of nomadic and overturned territory, reinforce the idea of ​​a spatial and temporal fold.

In her work, the artist Gaëlle Cressent approaches the object as a territory through a prothéiforme production (sculpture, photography, installation ..) transforming the processes linked to the classical use of the latter, inventing a proper logic of presentation contextualized. It thus forms links, by folding triviality and great history of art; creating a trans-historicity could tell us between the anecdotal and the universal. With this project she opens her research to the objects and constructions that populate the popular gatherings, going thus towards a study of the political object, in the etymological sense of the term, or how the object still and always comes to organize or jeopardize the functioning of the city, the state and these contemporaries.

Thanks to her three-month residency at MeetFactory in partnership with Ceaac in Strasbourg and the French Institute in Prague, the artist was able to develop this project, between sculpture and stage. Based on the collaboration of knowledge, the sound part was entrusted to the french DJ Groove Addiction resident for ten years in the Czech Republic and actor of the evolution of the techno scene in Prague.

Groove Addiction 
Activist in European Techno underground scene since end of 90's under the name "Proton" with many productions, he plays all around Europe in rave…. In 2007 he changed his name for Groove Addiction, started a permanent residence in Prague and after long road trip with the crew "Elektropump" he decided to join them to burn all dance floor with a fresh bass music style... This had a resolutely ultra positive and happy frame of mind which influenced characterized all his future lives. He distills liveset all over Europe and had residence in the famous club founded by "Yes Papa" in Prague in 2011, the Yesclub. This allows him to play with the best known artists on the electro scene. Last year was a new musical excited time with slower beat but more melodic project. Now Groove Addiction plays throughout Europe and the rest of the world (south america 2014 and asian tour 2015) in clubs and festivals, delivering an effective and definitely happy live, mixing melodies and remixes but always spiced with dancing beats.
Listen his work here. 

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