Alegría Gobeil

IMAGE DE MA MAIN - crédit Alegria Gobeil, vouloir se blesser (2022)

Alegría Gobeil lives/works with practices considered self-destructive. Doctored forms of action – what is considered unintentional, accidental, contagious, compulsive, collective, symptomatic – inform their work. Their indisciplinary practice takes the form of performances, writing, archives, images, protocols, documents and installations. It circulates in the visual and performance art context here (Le Lieu, Espace Maurice, Folie/Culture, OFFTA, FAAS/Centre CLARK, Centre SKOL, FAPTR, RLAP) and recently, elsewhere (Gruentaler9, Berlin), as well as in the literary context (Moebius, Cigale, Calliope, Festival de la poésie de Montréal, Le Port de Tête la nuit). A holds a Master’s degree in visual and media arts (UQAM), their research proposed anti-psychiatric and performative theory/practice of self-injury, in light of the experience of psychiatric interrogation.

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que vaut la tête qui s’écrase sous une lumière qui ne s’éteint jamais

Extrapolated from a reflection on self-preservation, this residency takes as its anchor a script shaping the strange work that is both vital and harms us, in order to explore the violence that circulates within it. What emerges is a fragmented text relayed by a character who isn’t one (because it speaks as you, as us), who studies, notes and archives the forms of power unfolding around it. Interested in considering the injunction to self-regulation, the normative aspects of “healthy” behavior, and the individual pathologization of people who have experienced violence, this indisciplinary theater piece will act as catalyst to a text formulated in urgency.

The first work of staging and playwriting by performance artist Alegria Gobeil, this research takes into account repetition within the theatrical format as a tangible constraint and as a form of negotiation with the person enacting the work. Working with Charles Voyer as a performer (Le Théâtre indépendant), the artist is interested in making tangible a process inherent to the theatrical device: one person making someone else do something. Having always worked with/on their own body, Gobeil here elaborates a form within a relationship of friendship – extending the large body of their work to Voyer’s, transforming it in the process.