[ISEA2009] Artists Talk: Sylvie Marchand & Lionel Camburet – AmeXica sKin: a colloborative event questioning borders

Artists Statement

AmeXica skin questions the worldwide migratory flux in collaboration with international artists who join the dialogue through on line web events and off line performances set into the installation.

‘AmeXica’ refers to the border zone between Mexico and the U.S. I resent the binary conception of the border as a separation between two worlds. ‘AmeXica’ points to a transforming, hybrid culture. This presents a challenge for an emerging artistic, transcultural, and collaborative form which is a necessity response to overcome violence.

In the open space of the multimodal and inclusive work AmeXica sKin I am putting at stake my commitment to history as an artist: how can I shape my testimony, my point of view as an artist, beyond the clichés of mass media, of politics and cultural and aesthetical habits? ‘I have chosen to witness the crossing of the border as a succession of trials, the symbolical image of the maze, the materialization of the threat of death but also of the quest of life.’ (Sylvie Marchand) ‘sKin’ The frontier is sensitive and alive, changing, capable of feeling the world and it’s flows just like the skin. The skin-frontier metaphor guides the creation of the scenography, offering a complex, porous and receptive interactive space.
Sylvie, with Gigacircus, uses today’s technologies of the ‘increased body’ to carry further the range of her voice and that of the migrants’ she met, thereby extending and activating a network of artistic reflection. Fieldwork, migrating art and mobility ‘Of Gold and asphalt’, ‘Temps d’Histoires pour Compostelle’, ‘Tsagaan Yavarai, may the road be white…’, ‘Transhumances’, ‘Passages to Ostabat’ or ‘Passeur’, are previous wandering web performances, installations, and collaborative events made by the Gigacircus Media Art Group. Like ‘AmeXica sKin’, these works were created in the process of action, on foot, on the road, in a truck or a caravan of the Gigacircus mobile lab, in the course of nomadisation …
Each of these particular scenographies questions the digital technologies and the tools of network communication, they obey the fluidity of travelling, the rhythm of the body, and focus on exchange and dialogue with local or distant audiences.

  • Sylvie Marchand, Collectif GIGACIRCUS, France
  • Lionel Camburet, Collectif GIGACIRCUS / Ecole Europeenne Supérieure de l’Image, Poitiers, FR

Full Text (PDF) p. 254-256