Totemic Studies

What would be my Totem in the current context of the end of the  world? How to move the usual definition in my own perspective? An old  tradition sees in any solo a concern for self-portrait, subject of the  streched thread between an individual and a community of spectators.”

In  Totemic Studies, Matthieu Barbin treats that troubled point in which  the violence and the enjoyment of being gazed on, are intertwined. The  spectrum of his Totembecomes a matter of contemporary representations.  By handling a multiplicity of compositional processes such as speeches,  words, reflexions about the solo exercice, craft practices, and  exploiting both their functional aspects and their heterotopic  capacities, he activates and deconstructs the categories of his  visibility. “Take this is my body.” It will be all about that. A body  forced to manipulate a bunch of tools in order to find figures through  which it can identify himself. Twisting in all directions the dialectic  of looking and being looked, he engages himself in a game of putting  on/off, unveiling the layers of his social and performative  constructions and at the end making fun of himself. Because it’s also  about questioning this ritual, sometimes absurd, never pointless, about a  performer who puts himself in a spectacular spectrum, who summons an  audience, a space, a situation then who tries to extract himself from  it. Slipping between abstraction and eroticism, Matthieu Barbin becomes  object and subject, totem and taboo, mirror and caricature of his time.

Source: program of the CND