Se limiter au maximum

It's hot and humid out, and the July sky is full of smoke. We’re working on an operetta. Under our costumes, sweat mingles with the chemical smell of ghillie suit. Soil and dead leaves cling to us; our camouflage skin. We lie motionless beneath sumacs and inside culverts, only barely able to breathe. It’s comforting to share the same temporary shelter.

After morning coffee, we begin our daily improvisations: cult-like nursery rhymes, MIDI contraptions, noodling synthesizers. We play the yes game: always embracing the first idea moves us forward and brings us together. Bodies awaken, fingers free themselves. Equipment and materials cover the floor, the patio, and beyond. The house is filled with faces of paper bags, coloured string, felt, thread and tassels.

During the night, a mouse finds refuge in our costumes. Miu Miu hunts it down. We don’t sleep much; insomnia is a shared condition. Hollow-eyed, we explore the suburbs, the vacant lots, the tall grass, the hiding places. There are bungalows, there are tents. Creatures lurk around the outskirts.

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Se limiter au maximum is rooted in the North American suburb, where the promise of a better life and the pernicious effects of exponential growth and accumulation live side by side. A series of interventions around the edges of suburbia initiates a geopoetics of love-informed urgency; the gallery becomes an escape room where we leave ordinary time behind to enter the ritualistic space of eternal return.

Through states of playful regression and disconcerting ecstasy, sometimes we believe the beautiful lie, and sometimes we don’t. Reality shimmers in the omnipresent smog as we strive to project a brighter future. Fatigue sets in, and bodies gather in search of rest.

Four entities meet on a diamond-shaped patio to observe a society of exhaustion. Together, they look for ways out of the mental and bodily depletion that—not without irony—contributes to the depletion of the land itself. Our motto: se limiter au maximum [we limit ourselves to the max].

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AT THE LIMIT of a laboratory. AT THE LIMIT of an operetta. AT THE LIMIT of a film. AT THE LIMIT of a performance. AT THE LIMIT of a poem. AT THE LIMIT of an invitation. AT THE LIMIT of a hypothesis. AT THE LIMIT of a contradiction. AT THE LIMIT of a marriage. AT THE LIMIT of a fairy tale. AT THE LIMIT of a plateau. AT THE LIMIT of a fantasy. AT THE LIMIT of a mise en abîme. AT THE LIMIT of wandering. AT THE LIMIT of too much. AT THE LIMIT of repetition. AT THE LIMIT of emptiness. AT THE LIMIT of an exhibition. AT THE LIMIT of an open door. AT THE LIMIT of a closed door.

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What a lovely bouquet of symptoms. But why diagnose when you could mumble into a stinky microphone? Do a pirouette in a vacant lot? Gently stroke synthetic fur? Why? Why?

A single second of joy drives out a hundred years of sadness. Or so they say…