SWITCH is an installation made of eight parts scattered in the presentation area. It is a sort of theatricalization of the contemporary subject torn between practice and theory, as suggested by the work's subtitle, Theory vs. Everyday Experience. The English term “versus” emphasizes the combative style of this strange encounter between the characters, as well as with the spectators who discover them and start to listen to their strange quibblings.

The word “Switch” is sufficiently vague for us to be able to interpret it as a change, a permutation, an exchange, a diversion, or alternatively as the fact of turning off or turning on some switch. By gradually discovering the characters, it is of course possible to understand that what is happening is a change or a shift from one theoretical and/or practical model to another, with each one behaving differently, what's more without any hierarchy being established between them, or any order of appearance, as it were. Because the artist takes into account the architectural specificity of the place, using here the threshold spaces of the museum which artists usually do not make use of (walls, floors, white cubes, black boxes), it is only after having encountered all the characters in this little theatre, hidden here and there, that it is possible to get a more precise idea, but one that remains ambiguous, of what they are and what they are doing, both in theory and in practice. The doll called “Emotions” expresses various emotions solely by onomatopoeia, from laughter to contentment, fear to anger, not to say well-being, disgust, anxiety or even pleasure. Contrary to their name, the “Talking Lights” (two bulbs that are synchronized with the sound) do not really talk to one another, but rather let loose their monologue, even if the exchange can exist to all intents and purposes, as if by complementarity, because the red, associated with a man's voice, defends the negative vision of the “ego”, whereas the green, associated with a woman's voice, defends a positive vision of it. The “Director” gives instructions to a crew we do not see, unless we ourselves are involved in it – a sensation strengthened by certain sentences like, “You're all there at the same time, in the same space,” or, “Hey you! You with the face, I can see you moving!” The “Simulacrum” for its part is interactive, since the spectator can, through the doll in which he is able to manipulate the device made up of a camera and a microphone, thanks to a surveillance station with monitor, mike and lever, be in contact with another place in the exhibition venue, and thus move about with a false body. The “Philosophers” (the same character duplicated or with a twin) also carry on monologues alternating between banalities (such as how to treat fl u, for example) and much more serious questions concerning judgement, conscience, necessity and the value of the truth of propositions. In the “Wall Projection”, a hidden surveillance camera captures people who happen to be outside the museum, and projects their image inside, transforming times and spaces, as well as their functions. Lastly, “The Eye”, an impressive socket which we first of all think is keeping an eye on us, is, in reality, in the process of watching TV, feverishly channel hopping, from one programme to another, something attested to by the reflections we can make out in the iris, and the different voices of the presenters and actors coming from the set. Several readings are open to us, all of them plausible: each character is in fact the metaphor of a single person split into several egos, having as many forms of existence, attitudes, emotions and reflections as he does by offering technologies which he manipulates or which manipulate him, which he makes use of or which make use of him, which are a part of him or which he quite simply uses. The characters are subjected to this omnipotent and omniscient eye which seems to control everythin steered by its sole and powerful gaze, cast at any given moment on the tiniest detail, movement, word or expression. The eye inevitably calls to mind the eye of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. Or it's just the opposite, the characters control the eye, for the programmes which intrigue the latter are perhaps the theatrical presentations made for us by Oursler, unveiled and laid bare. All kinds of media dominate us and fracture this ego that we are, cleave it and fracture it the better to distil their commercial and instrumental ideology. What “The Philosophers” are actually talking about (starting, among other things, with extracts of writings by R. Barthes, M. Foucault, G.W. Leibnitz, I. Kant, P. Kitcher): what is to be done, how are we to act, and should we judge things thus? But a more attentive ear and a liaison with the other characters lead us back to the initial question: are all these theoretical words which do not seem to culminate in anything concrete, practical or applicable, or any action which might change the course of things, are they thought through for us by the media, by the characters we are listening to? Or are we not in our turn characters conceived by the objects we make and think we have mastery of? If the installation as a whole can be understood as a narrative relating metaphorically to the cinematographic system, we might also understand that we have become part of a film in which we are at once viewers and actors, subject to the orders of the director.

Jacinto Lageira

Translated by Simon Pleasance