Christophe Meierhans (CH/BE)

SOME USE FOR YOUR BROKEN CLAY POTS

17 - 18 March 2017
h. 20.30

Some use for your broken clay pots is a performance that involves the audience in a collective debate lasting about two hours, around an imaginary democratic system that the performer tries to “sell” to his audience as a better alternative to our current democratic regimes.

The script of the performance is a real constitutional book imagined for a democratic state, made available to the audience during the performance. This constitution and the democratic institutions it prescribes were developed and written in close collaboration with a team of jurists from several Belgian universities.

It is a work of ‘constitutional fantasy’ that includes all the organs, procedures, assemblies, rules and regulations necessary to define a complete democratic system that is, in theory, functional. It was developed with the intention of producing something as different as possible from our current regulations, to discuss what democracy represents using a possible logic of defence from the public, through a method that is as rational and strong as possible.

 

 

Some use for your broken clay pots is thus an exercise in constitutional creativity. Challenging the ability to imagine an alternative to our current (universally understood) political system, artist and spectators together confront the limits of our understanding of democracy, experimenting with an amusing, surreal and highly topical idea of participatory performance.

 

In Italian

 

Conceived, directed and with: Christophe Meierhans Dramaturgy: Bart Capelle in collaboration with: Rudi Laermans Advising team: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux(ULB), Rudi Laermans(KU),Jean-Benoît Pilet(ULB),Dave Sinardet(VUB) Constitutional jurist: Anne-Emmanuelle Bourgaux Scenography: Sofie Durnez Conception & graphic design publication: The Theatre of Operations Illustration: Nuno Pinto Da Cruz Co-production: Kaaitheater(Brussels), Workspace Brussels, Vooruit Arts Centre (Ghent), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) Production: Mokum / Hiros with the support of: de Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie & Government of Flanders Production Italian version: ON (Bologna) with the participation of Festival di Santarcangelo (2015)

 

 

Christophe Meierhans (Geneva; Brussels) works with and through performance, public space, installation, sound, music and video. His work mainly consists of developing strategies of intervention in everyday life, through the manipulation of accepted conventions, social habits or simple customs. Fragments of reality become the framework for artistic operations that redirect banality in order to make it reappear from unexpected angles. His work raises questions about norms and conventions, confusing a random context with different ones, and confronting the viewer with something else, with the strangeness of being in the “wrong” place, or the possibility that the place may become something different. In 2015, he presented the project Some use for your broken clay pots at Santarcangelo.

 

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