Matthieu Barbin

What would be my Totem in the current context of the end of the world? How to move the usual definition in my own perspective? An old tradition sees in any solo a concern for self-portrait, subject of the streched thread between an individual and a community of spectators.”

In Totemic Studies, Matthieu Barbin treats that troubled point in which the violence and the enjoyment of being gazed on, are intertwined. The spectrum of his Totembecomes a matter of contemporary representations. By handling a multiplicity of compositional processes such as speeches, words, reflexions about the solo exercice, craft practices, and exploiting both their functional aspects and their heterotopic capacities, he activates and deconstructs the categories of his visibility. “Take this is my body.” It will be all about that. A body forced to manipulate a bunch of tools in order to find figures through which it can identify himself. Twisting in all directions the dialectic of looking and being looked, he engages himself in a game of putting on/off, unveiling the layers of his social and performative constructions and at the end making fun of himself. Because it’s also about questioning this ritual, sometimes absurd, never pointless, about a performer who puts himself in a spectacular spectrum, who summons an audience, a space, a situation then who tries to extract himself from it. Slipping between abstraction and eroticism, Matthieu Barbin becomes object and subject, totem and taboo, mirror and caricature of his time.

A performer and choreographer, Matthieu Barbin is present alongside Boris Charmatz, Marlène Saldana & Jonathan Drillet, Gerard & Kelly or else Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard. He was invited to take part in the research group KADMOS/festival of Avignon 2013. During the Nordïk Impact 2017, he created FOR JODOROWSKY with the musicians of Il est Vilaine. He participated in the conception of the futuristic fable Traum (Le paradoxe de V.) in collaboration with SMITH and Victoria Lukas, during the New Settings festival.