Part of Winter 2004
A co-presentation with Media City Festival (www.houseoftoast.ca)
Two years after they brought their epic reinvention of Moby Dick to Canada, French experimentalists MTK return with yet another multi-screen, multi-projector performance. Where Mody Bleach took us to the depths of Captain Ahab’s psyche and the ocean he drowned in, the Projos Quartet propels us into space. But, this is no normal journey into space. This is a push beyond the grand finale of 2001, buffeting the viewer with spectral visions writ large. Improvising on eight hand-modified projectors, manipulating the image with scopic lenses and gels, MTK creates a visceral visual poetry, one that may borrow from the normal cinema, but can never be given back.
MTK is the cineaste quartet of Christophe Auger, Etienne Caire, Xavier Quérel and Gaëlle Rouard. Centred around their laboratory in Grenoble, where they acquire and hand-process their own footage, they are a popular performance troupe on the European circuit. Projos Quartet follows Mody Bleach and The Cube, which found them projecting from inside a box-shaped screen over the course of 24 hours. Even after those feats of expanded cinema, the troupe considers Projos Quartet to take the cinematographic apparatus one step further. Whichever direction that may lead, it will be worth the journey.