In his first years of experimentation, video often set up an impossible, impracticable space between the body and the medium – a relationship of fascination and repulsion. In this performance, Michael Druks represents himself in a private place, tightly focused around a centre: a television set, an object among objects. He adds passages and connections, penetrating within the apartment, turning around the television, obstructing this image with a series of objects or masks. He thus attempts to enter the television programme, to modify it.
This parasitic effect, this impediment to the image and sound is produced from the outside. He glues himself to the surface of the screen, superimposes his own photography, draws his body all around it, imposing and affixing another programme in an authoritative manner. The simplicity of the lines, which are drawn, then painted (the reel ends on a black monochrome), turn this screen into a medium for diverse means, a 'magic slate' which simultaneously excludes and retains an infinite number of expressions.

Stéphanie Moisdon

translated by Yves Tixier and Anna Knight