project image
Jean-Baptiste Barret
WATER.SYNC

first performed on July 26, 2019
La Station Culturelle, 118 Rue Lamartine, Fort-de-France, Martinique
performed twice in 2019

ALEX CÔTÉ

Montreal, Canada
alexcote.h@gmail.com
alexcoteh.com

WATER.SYNC
ALEX CÔTÉ

“Water.Sync” delivers to the public a sensory experience with water. I began the performance with a slow birth from a plastic dripping envelope. I then placed six organic calabash bowls in which I performed daily actions with water: drinking, showering, washing, and peeing. Behind me was a huge pottery vase in which the spring water is found during the entire performance. The more I repeated these actions, the more black, chemical, polluted, and missing the water became. The relationship with my water deteriorated when I plunged my hands into the vase of spring water and pulled out my hands filled with black oil, which led me to seek new sources. I took a massive shell from which I removed meters and meters of plastic scattered inside. Quickly, my body became induced with black oil and the performance environment filled with plastic. I revealed tons of different plastic, until finding bananas that I hastened to cover with pesticide. There were only two empty calabashes left, which I filled with drinking water, mixed with the other soiled bowls and continued to contaminate. A single bowl remains drinkable, which I handed out to the public for drinking, asking the inner question: what water do we drink? I ended the performance by plunging my hands again into the vase of spring water, this time revealing small dead fish in a plastic envelope, until each spectator had one in hand. The video environment presents various water landscapes that are mapped in space and on the performer’s body. Water travels in several forms during the performance, as does the smell that goes from the organic down to the chemical, from purity to impurity.