This is a link to a short editing of the Last lighthouse Keepers, show made in Bergen, march 2014.
With Mark Knoop, Adam Rosenblatt and Céline Bernard.

 

The lighthouse is a sign of recognition and safety, on the edge of the unknown and danger.  The strength and slowness of the light ray gives a compacity to it. Although it is useless nowadays, some are still working, and the last lighthouse keepers have a practice, a job, a habitus which will soon be lost.
Identically, i consider artistic activity to be disappearing from the world. Not under its most conventional forms, but precisely because of its exposure and the multiplication of facilities, media and technic; if we consider art as a individual practice, not made for any commercial developement, a space where everything is possible, then artists are like the last lighthouse keepers, showing roving light on the abysses of the unconscious to the growing rationalist and materialist world.

The show is a mere development of this metaphor.
The audience is in the middle of the room, and above, the lighthouse bulb enlights, reveals the unknown external forces, materialized by the performers and the set design. Starting from a unfinished speech to the audience, the performers little by little transform into dreamlike creatures, unsuccessfully looking for order, significant boundaries which are given by the rhythm of the central turning light.
They change actions, transform, mutate from music to gestures, texts, etc. and this transformation moves from performer one to another. Like in the old alchemy traditions, the transformation of material has an influence on the body. Here the performers mute into objects, and establish a relation to the design which dilutes their personality into elements of a psyche, until a final point of explosion.

François Sarhan, may 2014

CHAMBORD EXHIBITION

a little book available in the Chateau's shop,

with important and new revelations by Prof. Glaçon

 illustrations of the book

 description of the castle according to the encyclopaedia

In its present form, the Chateau de Chaambord is at one and the same time an improvement on a pre-existing farm (there are other such examples in the surrounding area which have remained stable and firm … farm, stable and farm … whatever), and a draft for another chateau which was to have been far larger and more convincing. At first, the architects went about things in an odd way heaping up details, decorative features, windows and sculptures without any real overview. It was only later, after they’d popped these elements in any old how, that a semblance of order appeared and everything had to be taken down so what was now old could be put back into a new order. Quite remarkably, these painful developments are not visible in the end result’s handsome unity. But traces remain … in an attention to detail running counter to certain oddities in the larger scale. The fireplaces, for instance, are finely worked but are not up to the job of heating the building. No one worried about this, as their purpose was to speed up the transport of goods, dishes and servants rather than conduct smoke.