Matthieu Saladin — There’s A Riot Goin’ On — CAC Brétigny — Performance

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Matthieu Saladin — There’s A Riot Goin’ On

Performance

Installation, sound - music

Matthieu Saladin
There’s A Riot Goin’ On

Past: January 1, 2013 → March 31, 2014

One Year’s Exhibition

There’s a Riot Goin’ On is a missing track of the 1971 eponymous album by Sly & the Family Stone. It is simply indexed in the album’s tracklist, no clue nor commentary shedding any light on its strange status. It ends side A, when the stylus leaves the vinyl’s groove and when the listening covertly moves from the recorded music to its environment. In its silence, it is a revolt without a manifesto, its meaning seeming to appear only in intervals. There’s A Riot Goin’ On is the sign of something apparently neither visible nor audible, that nonetheless states itself as already at work.

As an exhibit statement and a production program, this title congregates a strewn series of more or less discreet announcements, actions, publications, software products, invitations, sound manifestations and events which will come to life and unfold during the whole year 2013 at the CAC Brétigny, appearing in public space, the press and on the internet. But the track’s invisibility and inaudibility do not only refer to this “silent rebellion”; they also concern aspects of life, both social and economic, whose immateriality and/or omnipresence elude direct understanding, and that still orientate and model attitudes, behaviors and discourses, social relations and daily activities.

But beyond stock flows, opinion polls, communication devices (from the cell phone to electronic messaging, via newspapers), archives of demonstrations as well as the ideological imprints of cultural productions are appropriated and serve as a material to question the construction of social space, the tensions that pervade and reshape it, the relationships between aesthetic perception and the economics that conditions it, the activity of an art center and its territorial setting, or even the concept of democracy itself.

There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be the set of realizations and formulations that will result from these dynamics. The CAC Brétigny represents its centrifugal starting point, the basis of its dissemination, as well as the potential location of its unpredictable return.