Perpétuité III
On-site installation2025
Perpétuité III is part of our solo exhibition: La Société Automatique.
About the installation series Perpétuité:
Industrial robots are conceived to perform repetitive tasks with almost absolute precision. They perform them without fatigue, without rest, without loss of concentration and without hesitation. This is the mastery of automation, a synchronised symphony.
In the installation series Perpétuité, we want to stage industrial machines in endless tasks guided by algorithms, in a kind of perpetual performance.
The vision we are trying to represent is that of our realization through the technoneoliberal dream, the total replacement of humans by automation.
We face our extinction as our technological creations, our machines, overtake us as masters of repetition, collaborative work, data and computation. But they also replace Sisyphus, condemned like him to repeat and undo a task in perpetuity.
About Perpétuité III:
The work spans three different spaces, exploring the hyperreality described by Jean Baudrillard: a world of simulacra, where copies no longer refer to an original but entirely replace it.
Perpétuité III begins with a film documenting a performance recorded within the exhibition space by a robotic device.
Designed to track the dancer's movements, this technical apparatus has kept track of its own mechanical ballet, which it now endlessly replays in the performance space stripped of its performers. The images that the robot continues to record are accumulating in a ghostly, sedimentary visual memory.
Reality is therefore never accessible here: only its mediated representations remain, multiplied and altered by technology. The audience becomes an unwitting participant in a performance where human presence is both erased and multiplied.
Credits
Perpétuité IV by Félix Luque in collaboration with Vincent Evrard
Production: Félix Luque Sánchez
Software: Vincent Evrard
Hardware: Félix Luque Sánchez
Original soundtrack: Ben Bertrand
Choreography and performance: Mercedes Dassy
Costume design: Marie Artamonoff & Mercedes Dassy
Technic: Robotic system with PZT camera, custom hardware and software, performer, musician, lighting. Video proyector. TV Display. Mirror with sound speaker.
Perpétuité IV is part of “La Société Automatique” a coproduction of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (secteur arts numériques), LABoral, Europalia Espagne and iMAL.