SCATEMPLEin situ collage and participatory video installation
production : Metazone TV, la Nuit Blanche 2007, Mairie du quatrième arrondissement de Paris
Scatemple is an installation designed to be established in public lavatories. Users/visitors are invited to participate to the iconoclastic diversion of such convenient places by superimposing a collaborative visual and sound creation.
The icons pointing out the restroom are extremely stylised but still identifiable by everyone and infinately adaptable. These icons are here dismembered and reduced to elementary gemotric forms in order to build the image of a monstruous crowd spread on the walls and on the ceiling ("etricons")
In a sound atmosphere favourable to contemplation ("coprolalie"), users/visitors are proposed to participate to the dressing up of the walls and to leave a mark of their passage in this place by composing a sequence of a stop-motion animated movie ("pause-culotte") that is live projected on top of the door of the lavatory.
Through a language limited to three gemotric forms cut from pieces of black cardboard, Scatemple is built and animated on the rythm of successive interventions of visitors who are led to elaborate some continuity, a connecting thread in a collective way. Everyone is free to play with this constraint by superimposing one's image or one's shadow to these paper icons.
Restroom space is thus little by little dressed up and inhabited until it is fully saturated by a dark crowd of set and moving figures. Toilet is not only a place of evacuation, but also a kind of gut passageway where collective digestion of an icon is being processed. Rather than having the urinal entered the museum, it is a matter of letting the public take over this trite space by considering it from a recreational, creative and cooperative point of view.
The animated movie made by the passing through night-birds in the lavatory of the 4th district town hall of Paris on October 6th 2007.
