There’s A Riot Goin’ On
Matthieu Saladin
January–December 2013
CAC Brétigny
Centre d’art Contemporain de Brétigny
Espace Jules Verne, rue Henri Douard
91220 Brétigny-sur-Orge France
Free access: Tuesday–Saturday, 2–6pm
info [at] cacbretigny.com
T +33 (0)1 60 85 20 76
Admission free
www.cacbretigny.com
www.g20song.net
Curator: Pierre Bal-Blanc
“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 orient and model attitudes, behaviors and discourses, social relations and daily activities.
Thus, G-20 song, which we hereby launch, is a website that transposes in real time the stock market index of the G-20 countries (which represent 85% of global economic exchanges) into sound frequencies. The software identifies the internet user’s localization and if he/she is within one of the G-20 countries, the website directly plays, by default, the index of the user’s country. If he/she is in a country that is not part of the G-20, all indexes are played simultaneously. The frequencies generated evolve, attracting or repelling each other according to the market’s fluctuations and engendering, by their movement, acoustic phenomena: www.g20song.net (warning: the website is optimized for Mozilla Firefox).
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.
Matthieu Saladin‘s practice results from a conceptual approach, which reflects upon the history of forms, of creative processes and social constructs, as well as on the relationships between art and society from an economic and political perspective. He is also a member of the editorial board of Volume!, the French academic journal dedicated to popular music studies (Éditions Mélanie Seteun) and editor-in-chief of the journal TACET, on experimental music. He teaches philosophy of art at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin and is part of the “Musique et Arts Sonores” research team (Institut ACTE, Panthéon-Sorbonne University / CNRS).
Current programs at CAC Brétigny
From 23 March to 27 April
SEXTET
The Tiger’s Mind Re-iterated
Featuring
Beatrice Gibson, Will Holder, Alex Waterman,
Jesse Ash, Céline Condorelli and John Tilbury
with the addition of
Matthieu Saladin, Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan),
Dominique Mathieu, and Vier5 et Pierre Bal Blanc
Guest starring Marcello Maloberti
Upcoming program on 16 April
Like a Cloud Hanging in the Sky?
Matthieu Saladin
Uncoupdedés, the online magazine of centres d’art marking 30 years of decentralisation
www.uncoupdedes.net
