Digit / Julien MairePerformance
Intriguing, Julien Maire’s performance is magic-like, as magic as creation itself… There is not a visible word creation mechanism, it remains a well hidden secret, drawing even more captivation from the fascinated audience. Double-face / Julien MairePerformance
About Julien Maire An artist and a performer, Julien Maire works with audiovisual techniques. In particular, he is interested in photography methods and the exploration of the image in all its forms, as displayed in his recent installation Exploding camera, a post 9/11 work examining news and history through a destroyed medium. The projects he has led since 1995 are also characterized by the exploration of visual and spatial perception, namely Double-face, which will be presented at Mois Multi. Born in France, and currently living and working in Berlin, Julien Maire is a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Metz. His recent works were presented at the Arts Electronica Festival (Austria) in 2007. His work has also been shown in festivals, museums and galleries in Europe, China, and Japan. Julien Maire would like to thank : Le Conseil général de la Moselle
A presentation of the Productions Recto-Verso
in collaboration with Avatar
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A man sits at a table writing a text. By sliding his fingers over a blank piece of paper, even without a pen, phrases appear. The writer creates calligraphy, mysterious phrases, seemingly working in a surrealistic automatism. Even as the spectators come very close, the “writer” remains absorbed in his task as if caught up in a short-circuit between his mind and his hands. 
In Double-face the artist plays heads or tails repeatedly for a few minutes. Total attention is on the slowness of the action: the coin rotates in slow motion, giving the scene a cinematographic quality. The secret nature of the mechanism draws the performance closer to that of an illusionist, which the audience can observe in total bewilderment while questioning his gifts without ever being sure of the “trick”. What was a simple game gives way to an almost dreamlike reconsideration of the notions of gravity, of chance, and of time. 
