Jean Charles Massera
« The kings of the Meaning et le Pebble », 2016, 10 min 18
With Benoît Lambert, Géraldine Pochon and Louise Tourancheau
A mother doesn’t understand how her daughter can sleep with a right-wing guy or at least would like to know if she can physically feels he’s right-wing when he penetrates her... The father laments the fact that she only mobilizes for the green plants or melting glaciers... The daughter brings up the idea that the confusion between the means and ends is typical of his generation… J-CM
Since 2010, my work began to take the form of photographies, videos, installations or even drawings – which sought to operate within the dominant and alienating representations (what I call “the language and format of 'enemy'). A desire to operate at the heart of the imaginary of the genre that has built the culture, the ideology, the condition, which are (still) ours today.
Then this work began to dream of bodies, of beings, of resolutely without gender consciousnesses, emancipated from the worst determinisms and fantasies of identity. He began to listen to how feminine or non-binary genres try to find another place, in the dominant concert (with masculine accents) and especially in the writing of our History... All of this – again and again – from the dominant representations and projections…
Like these images that corporate culture gives us of ourselves, like these desires disseminated by logics of planned obsolescence, these entertainments of the meaning of History in progress… Or an approach that tries to recompose roles, places, ways of moving and positioning oneself... Choreographing the world differently, unoccupying spaces, taking bodies to their own aesthetics (their own beliefs) and resculpting them, put them back, make them interact differently... Putting bodies and minds back in the position of actors in History, trying not to get the fight too wrong, trying to change our views or more precisely to review certain things whose we didn't necessarily understand the relevance...
I am not trying to invent images, but to work on them from the inside so that we get out of those in which we are locked in.
Artist and writer, Jean-Charles Massera is the author of fictions (“United Emmerdements of New Order”, “We Are L’Europe”, etc. POL; “Verticales”...), plays (directed in particular by Brigitte Mounier, Jean-Pierre Vincent and Benoît Lambert). He has also written and produced numerous radio dramas (France Culture, Arte Radio, France Inter, France Bleu).
Since 2010, his work has essentially developed in the exhibition space (photographies, drawings, videos, sound and video installations, etc.). His works have been exhibited at the IAC (Institut d’Art Contemporain (Contemporary Art Institute) de Villeurbanne – France), FRI ART (Fribourg), the Biennale de Québec, at the MAC/VAL (Musée d'Art Contemporain (Contemporary Art Museum) du Val de Marne, France), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Casino Luxembourg, MoCo – Montpellier, Center de la Photographie (Photography Art Center), Geneva. Several of his films have toured at festivals in Europe and North America or are distributed by IndieFlix.
https://www.instagram.com/jeancharlesmasserastudio/