Pierre Larauza (Fr/Be)

1 November 2019 City Sonic

Xe gắn máy (Hon đa Kawassaki – Honda) (Belgian premiere)

Coming from the series, The Future Beauty of the Past, halfway between fiction and documentary historical reconstruction, the sculpture Xe gắn máy (‘motorcycle’ in Vietnamese) casts a worried glimpse of the future disappearance of motorcycles in Vietnam, in favor of 4×4 air-conditioned cars… brilliant and disproportionate, which multidisciplinary artist, Pierre Larauza, compares to impotent hearses. Xe gắn máy represents an urban mirage in which a dismantled motorcycle flew up to the sky, suggesting the disintegration of the past in the face of the current rise of cars. In this work, mixing dreaming with preservation, nostalgia confronts the future unknown. In a flowerbed made of plastic, a gravestone depicts the impossible funeral of the motorcycle: under the date of birth, ‘early 20th century’, the artist engraved in the stone as the date of disappearance: ‘I hope this will never happen’.

The documentary dimension is combined with a poetic approach reinforced by the sound environment (abstraction of urban sounds) made by the young Vietnames composer and DJ Teddy Chilla.

Production: Transcultures, European pepinieres for young artists.

Biography

Pierre Larauza is a multidisciplinary artist also involved in university research. He has been co-director of t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e since 2003 with choreographer Emmanuelle Vincent, where they explore movement in hybrid choreographic forms (performances, films and installations). In parallel, he develops a practical and theoretical work around the notion of ‘documentary sculpture’ in which he creates life-size reconstructions of cultural icons or historical movements (from a sporting gesture to a racist police abuse). PhD student in Art and Art Sciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, he is also co-founder in Vietnam of Máy xay sinh tố, a transcultural laboratory whose ambition is to constitute, in the long term, a base of experiences and non-ethnocentric reflections.