Katarina Sevic & Tehnica Schweiz

The Alfred Palestra project was originally a workshop with students at the Lycée Émile-Zola in Rennes. The workshop was designed as a way of coming to terms with various elements of history, stories and narratives. In that school, Alfred Jarry could almost have met Alfred Dreyfus. The gym of the school was used for the second trial of Alfred Dreyfus in 1899, and it was the school where Alfred Jarry sat his baccalaureate exam and wrote Ubu Roi. The artists based their project on the books that Dreyfus read during his imprisonment and the books that Jarry collected in the imaginary library of Dr Faustroll for the exploration of the fundamental themes that are still as essential today as they were at the end of the 19th century: justice, truth, freedom and education.

Over the course of recent years, the duo Tehnica Schweitz and Katarina Šević have created several projects involving plays and tableaux vivants. Sourcing their material from the history of avant-garde theatre, they have created collective performances by using codes from amateur and political theatre. What particularly interests them is the satirical and political potential of these theatrical forms, and the fact that they allow several voices to coexist and to raise important questions in an amusing way.

Production Les ateliers de Rennes / Art Norac /  LENDROIT EDITIONS

Performance Day is coproduced with the Playground festival, (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum Leuven), with support from the Agency for Arts and Heritage of Flanders, as part of the project "Alfred Jarry Archipelago" initiated by La Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art in Noisiel (France), Le Quartier Centre for Contemporary Art in Quimper (France) and Museo Marino Marini in Florence (Italy). The venture is part of Piano, the Franco-Italian art exchange platform, in collaboration with M-Museum and the STUK Kunstencentrum in the framework of Playground in Leuven (Belgium).