Light Years: Mécaniques Discursives
An installation by Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet
Design: Pasajero37
Ten years of collaborative work between Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet, also cofounder and member of the Antivj collective, have gone into the unprecedented, evolving creative experiment called Mécaniques Discursives, a work-in-progress rendered in an all-enveloping narrative space that comes about through the conjunction of age-old engraving techniques and innovative digital technology.
The end result of combining these distinct yet complementary art practices, the most recent version of this visual and sonic metanarrative -Mécaniques Discursives- opens at LABoral Centro de Arte within the framework of the 15th L.E.V. Festival, sponsored by Fundación EDP, as part of the Light Years programme.
In its current emplacement, in the art centre’s Projects Room, the work covers an area of 700 square metres and reaches a height of 12 metres. With a truly astounding mise en scène, on this occasion Mécaniques Discursives boasts the largest dimensions it has ever reached in an exhibition venue.
The light from over 15 simultaneous and immersive projections plays a key part in the work. The mix of small and large-scale animated projections brings over 250 different narrative elements to life. Taken together, they compose a visual-soundscape inhabited by shadowy monsters and lucid graphic and visual configurations.
The whole of LABoral’s Projects Room is turned into a gigantic stage setting peopled with strange chimeras, a disruptive world shaped by increasingly more complex and unintelligible realities overwhelmed by current techno-scientific advances and environmental changes.
In this installation, animated and inert beings expand over the floor and the walls. Connected by multiple narrative lines and light signals, the work conveys the sensation of a present past, whose shadows reverberate with echoes between the eras of Gutenberg and of Big Data.
The public is an integral part of the work, moving freely about in an imaginary and at once palpable world with over 500 years of history. Manifold symbolic elements resonate with the lights and shadows of a complex world of interconnected experiences and knowledge. This immersion in an expanded space-time invites each visitor to become an actor and yet another element in a passionate weft of endless narratives. By taking up and following any one of the threads we can discover the potential of our own imagination and weave other possible connections and narrative loops.
As a result of the untimely death of Fred Penelle in 2020, this installation will also be their last joint work and a heart-felt tribute to an artist who is no longer with us.
Curated by: Karin Ohlenschläger & Cristina de Silva & Nacho de la Vega (Colectivo Datatrón)
Graphic Design: Pasajero37
