STYLOS

#Director-Performer

2012

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This is a visual live art performance based on time.

This art work has a specific duration: Three hours.

Three hours equal three hundred sixty minutes 

which equal ten thousand eight hundred seconds .

 

3H = 360 MN = 10'800 SEC

 

The title of this work is Stylos.

That word comes from ancient Greek στύλος which means "column".

In ancient times, this object was used by spiritual people (stylites) who volontarily decided to escape from the « horizontal » world by living in it « vertically ». The stylites chose to isolate their body and their mind in order to find sort of a perfection in total loneliness and renouncement. 

 

In this pictorial performance, the viewers are confronted to a column carrying the body of a performer who is feeling and saying the time.

The performative body is placed on a four meters high column and can only move on a 70 cm2 space. There is no safety rope : it means there is an obligation for the body to control the vertigo implied by the height. Simultaneously, the performer has to focus his mind on counting in french every seconds of the three hours performance. This oral countdown (from 10’800 to 0) forces the performing mind to control time by saying it. The result of this appropriation leads to a continuous flow of numbers that pushes the soul of the performer to experience the present time.

 

Stylos is an experimental performance where a man is trying to understand the ageing process leading to death by trying to control every second of the time that is passing. 

This performance is a fight between human time and the concept itself of « Time » used by man to grasp the changes in the world.

This human sculpture can be watched from all sides.

The time is checked by the performer every 10 minutes with a chronometer.

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Concept/performer : Pierre Megos

Construction : Camelia zaoudi and gilles

Photographer : Herbert Schuller

Presented@ Halles de Schaerbeek (BE)