Combustion

With Combustion, Amaury Vanderborght and Cathy Blisson imagine an open-air performative form, a multi-screen video installation orchestrated by an operator handling pyrotechnic material and images on sight. Using the tools of audiovisual editing to juxtapose thousands of mediatized images traditionally associated with a final bouquet, they question the mechanisms underlying the use of entertainment as a weapon of mass diversion. National commemorations, military parades, sports demonstrations, commercial festivities and other popular celebrations... What images and symbols do we find drowned in a smoke screen in front of the spectacle of the explosion?

Amaury Vanderborght | amaury.vanderborght@gmail.com | +32 498 26 20 18

Cathy Blisson | cathy.blisson@gmail.com | +33 6 64 31 24 68

Production – Les Halles de Schaerbeek - Matthieu Goeury | matthieu.goeury@halles.be Production – Les Halles de Schaerbeek Agathe Cornez - Chargée de production | agathe.cornez@halles.be | +32 (0)2 226 57 62

Amaury Vanderborght, co-author and pyrotechnic designer

A circus artist and aerial acrobat by training, he studied at Circus Space in London before completing his training at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts du Cirque in Brussels in 2012. After various professional experiences in multiple European companies, he created the Compagnie du Poivre Rose in 2014 with the Canadian artist Claudel Doucet. Their first show Le Poivre Rose, created with the Czech musician Iva Bittová and directed by Christian Lucas, toured Europe for two years. This was followed by two creations, Memoires in 2017 and LIONS in 2020, in which he deepened his taste for creation and the mixing of artistic mediums. He directed with Arno Ferrera, a first short film entitled Translucides, where they experimented with collective creation in a closed psychiatric environment. At the same time, he trained in pyrotechnics with the French company Jacques Prévot, with whom he has worked since 2017. This practice leads him to collaborate with various pyrotechnic companies: SUGYP (Switzerland), Arteventia (France), SXM-SBH Fireworks (British Virgin Islands). Since 2021, he has joined the production office of the Belgian dance company Peeping Tom, as Tour Manager of the shows Kind and Diptych/Triptych.

Cathy Blisson, co-author and dramaturg

Journalist, dramaturg and documentary performance designer, Cathy  creates multimedia projects based on the writing of reality.

As a journalist for nine years at Télérama, she specialised in the coverage of hybrid contemporary creation, at the crossroads of scenic disciplines and visual arts. Still occasionally freelancing, she has collaborated with Libération and the magazine Mouvement.

In 2011, she joined forces with the Berlin Group to conceive and produce Zvizdal, a filmic theatre piece about the last inhabitants of an evacuated village in the suburbs of Chernobyl, filmed over five years as the seasons passed.

In 2015, she created the Collectif &. with Anne Quentin, to imagine projects that develop in the form of artistic investigations. Hosted by cultural institutions, the duo goes out to meet the inhabitants of their neighbourhoods, to make audible words that are little heard or ignored by the media, and to put them back into play through all the media that seem appropriate, from the conference-performance to the textual and sound exhibition, via the ball or rap cabaret.

As a playwright, she also accompanies the work of research teams (Cies Un Loup Pour l'Homme, Naïf Production, Le Clair Obscur...) to whom she lends her pen, her ear, and a certain outlook: sound creation pieces and workshops, dramaturgy of transdisciplinary projects, adaptation of novels for the stage... She also collaborates with the composer Christophe Ruetsch on an evolving sound installation based on heartbeat recordings and intimate interviews.