Christophe Giffard - Thomas Hatcher - Phillip Schulze

Phillip Schulze

Born in 1979 in Düsseldorf, where he lives and works.

Christophe Giffard
Born in 1974 in Toulouse, where he lives and works.

Thomas Hatcher

Born in 1985 in the United Kingdom, lives and works in Toulouse.

For the Toulouse International Art Festival, Phillip Schulze, Christophe Giffard and Thomas Hatcher are proposing two hybrid performative systems created for the venue.

Working with the site, making it resound and sparkle, reconfiguring it and undoing
it; setting up modes of dialogue, collaboration and relationship between the participants, through, for and against the place; besieging the exhibition venue, occupying it like a stronghold–all so many issues around which Phillip Schulze, Christophe Giffard and Thomas Hatcher have pooled their ideas. In the form of son et lumière installations devised like so many commentaries about a space, the work of the visual artist and composer Phillip Schulze functions by way of auditory and visual arrangements and combinations. His works sparkle and cry out, spit and irradiate, alternating regressive jubilation and threatening silence.

In The Shining, a pile of projectors and lights rubs shoulders with loudspeakers and amplifiers creating a concert of electronic moans and groans. The art venue shows its functional ambiguity, somewhere between theatre, concert hall, cinema and art gallery, while at the same time reasserting its intractability as a territory of sensation. The collaborative work of the three artists plays on the transposition of sites and the dovetailing of referents

through a playful approach to the obstruction and interference inherent in the collective expression. Their environmental work is conceived like an artificial habitat filled with artefacts, a plastic set conjuring up a futuristic and paradoxical form. Plunged in half-light, a glow comes from an inaccessible point in the space, dull rumbles echo in the building, we can make out shapes, an architecture, evocations of another place, another time, and a “great elsewhere”.

This proposition follows on from the work Triptyque produced at the site of the Chapelle des Carmélites as part of a residency at the Espace Croix-Baragnon and the exchange programme “Passages” between the Cities of Düsseldorf and Toulouse.