Venues: Bac

A month before I arrived in Geneva I was told by the organizers of the mapping festival that this year the festival was offered a gallery space for installations.
I had a picture in my mind of what this might look like and I have to say that when I arrived and saw the Bac it pretty much dwarfed whatever was in my mind in terms of size and esthetics of what completes a picture when one thinks of a gallery in contemporary terms.

The Bac was once a manufacturing facility for precision medical tools. About a year ago it was transformed into white walled space with two floors connected by a metal staircase as well as a long hall with another room that when I visited it contained an installation where the room was walled with felt and felt tree like trunks suspended from the wall all and anchored to the floor.

From the outside the Bac is a grey mammoth with windows.

You enter the Bac from the street via a grey painted metal door and are then greeted by white framed white frosted glass doors.

Once past these you are greeted by the large space. The floor consists of fist sized wooden blocks. They are stained with machine oil, chemicals and small bits of silver. The smell mingles with that of the fresh white paint. I was told not to touch the floor and put my fingers in my mouth because of all the really bad chemicals that were absorbed into it. Nevertheless it looks really nice as long as you don't lick the floor.

In addition to the galleries there is on the ground floor a large theater/lecture area pictured below.

What will happen when in the space:

The Mapping Festival has been invited by the Centre de l'Image Contemporaine (CIC) to curate in the Bac from April 26th through May 13th with a series of video performances and video performance related installations.

From April 26th through May 5th afternoons in the Bac will host a series of talks and workshops by artists and lecturers who work in the field of VJ'ing.

Evenings from April 26th through May 5th the Bac will host a series of audio visual performances and DJ/VJ performances as well as a special three day open jam called SHARE that invites anyone to come in with a laptop or any other portable device to mix together live video and/or music.

During non-performance hours there will be no fee for entry. Evenings will require a small entry fee unless you can find any of the free passes that will be distributed around Geneva. During the SHARE event if you arrive with an instrument or laptop you enter for free.


What will be in the space:

On the ground floor there will be a bar with a multi projection and screen installation. The staircase will be transformed by the Paris architecture collective Exyzt. Mornings and post festival the theater will contain an audio visual project entitled 'Path to Abstraction' by graphic artist Quayola.

In the first open area on the second floor there will be a lounge with projections entitled 'CUBE3' designed and assembled by Matth and François et Pix. In the slightly more enclosed areas of the second floor will be an installation by the Swiss video artist Ulrich Fischer entitled 'Passages', a series of turntables that will be connected to visuals by the art group Compact/Box and Xárene Eskander's interactive version of the 'VE "JA book.

In a black box type room separate from everything else there will be an installation by the Swiss VJ Legoman for the first half of the festival and during the 2nd half an installation buy stdents from the ECAL art school in nearby Lausanne.

In the final days of the festival the artists and VJ's known as Peta Jenkin (aka Laserfinger) and Nicholas Mönch will be using a specially modified version of the ever ubiquitous (and Geneva based) modul8 VJ software to capture facial expressions of club goers at LeZoo. The resulting images and a proposed tent to be used in the club will be installed in what will as of April 6th no longer be a bar.
I think this is such a wonderfully prosaic way to complete a VJ festival by capturing the energy that moves a club environment and giving it a home beyond it's origins like hearing an echo of an explosion in a canyon.

Venues: LeZoo Usine

photo Stéphane Pecorini

If you are from Geneva this posting is kind of a redundant read. My intention here is to bring to light some of my own discoveries as a guest in Geneva to inform you people out there that have never been to the festival or Geneva and will either be attending as participant, guest or just checking out this site.

For the past two years LeZoo Usine in Geneva, Switzerland has been the gracious host of Mapping Festival and 2007 is no exception. First of all it is part of an entire organization dedicated to underground activities and art. L'Usine translated into English means 'Factory.' I think it's pretty fun to know that somewhere in our world there is a factory dedicated to producing underground culture.

For convenience I grabbed some text from the LeZoo web site:

"L'Usine is located in the center of Geneva, at the border of the Rhone, in an old factory of gold roughing. It was born from an association named the emergency state, a collective entirely dedicated to the underground culture, which gathers a great number of workshops and associations among which the Zoo, which itself was born from Débido."

L'Usine itself is a rather large and long structure for Geneva. There is a small park in front of the building entrance. At night, once you get past the bouncers and ticket booth you stand in front of a large high ceiling room with a wall to the left containing a bulletin board filled with posters and flyers. In front is the entrance to the venue that hosts live shows. To be honest I have never been in this room. During my last visit I found out a day late that Tarwater did a show there. Would have been fun. To the right is two part stair case enclosed by walls with more posters and some graff and a railing in the center. Having reached the top of the stairs. To the left is a bar and restaurant called Moloko. It kind of reminds me of bars in the East Village in NYC. Colorful punk characters and rock music. Turn right down a dark hall and you enter LeZoo.

The dance floor room is average in size. Probably about 15 by 30 meters. Everything is painted black or grey. There are windows behind the bar that face the river as well as a skylight above the center of the dance floor. Useful for that reality check when the sun rises so that the last people still there at 5:30 am face the fact that it's time to go home.

I was really impressed with LeZoo when I attended the first mapping in 2005. While I had seen a few venues with multiple projections I was completely floored by what the venue allowed the festival organizers to do with the space. Not only were there more then two projectors but a whole series of large and small screens positioned at several points along the beamer so at to have as many projected surfaces as possible with one beamer. What's more the arrangement of the screens was changed every night. As I later learned this sort of cooperation between the mapping organizers is something that is recurs throughout the year. LeZoo hosts a well attended monthly event called 'Laptop Fever' where different types of installations are created for each one using materials from previous mapping festivals and other special events.

This year the festival will spend five nights at LeZoo. Happily there is no lack of talent to fill these nights. Here is the current run down of all the artists participating at LeZoo. Today we are finalizing the printed flyer so what are reading now is sort of a sneak peek. And of course all of this will be posted on the web site proper in due time.

April 27th:
Crustea [FR]
Entter + Goto80 [SE,SD]
Antonin De Bemels [BE]
Francois Chalet [CH]

April 28th:
Amira + Vincent [CH]
Clandestine [CH]
Narrative Lab [UK]
Legoman [CH]

May 3rd:
Flashforceone [DE]
Dothy [FR]
Sigma6 [CH]

May 4th:
ECAL Team [CH]
Decrepticon [US]
No-Domain [SE]
Roman Urodovskih [RU]
Akinetic [CH]

May 5th:
Girrafentoast [DE]
Lichtfront Veejays [DE]
Pascal Greco [CH]
Peta Jenkins (Laerfinger) [AU] and Nicholas Moench [DE]

I'll get into the details of each artist with actual brief interviews when possible about what these people are doing for the festival and what there impressions of the festival are especially in regards to the space they are to play in. It will be interesting to compare my experience with the space with theirs.

If you have had any great experiences at LeZoo, enjoyed some visuals there and want to share your story please send me an email and I'll post it here.