VIS VIVA*
VIS VIVA*
The aim of art school is to build and reflect on one’s practice. But to get there, you need more or less support. Borgial signed up for the first workshop dedicated to performance art at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016. It was a practice that had only recently come to be considered within the institutions.
After that, Borgial had to find his own vocabulary on his own, without a mentor, and define the path of his gestures. Aware of his young age and everyone’s capacity to change, his aim is not to achieve a final form, but rather to unfold the range of possibilities, perfect the words and fine-tune the movements.
Born in Brazzaville in 1994, he moved to France after the civil war in 1997. During our first interview, he told me about the divide between two ways of life. A sort of distinction gradually emerged between the two, accentuated by his family’s geographical displacement and the passage of time, between what he left and what he returned to. Forced ubiquity. In his performances, Borgial creates a space-time in which he is both multiple and unique.
La flamme ailée – Borgial – Performance – Solo exhibition AETERNA by Art 54 (Paris) – July 2023
photo credits : Benjamin Manguele
THE BODY
Borgial’s performances put the body (first and foremost his own) to the test and in the spotlight, exposed to the elements of the environment or the scenography. Cradled in the sand or the wind, perched on endless wooden platforms, suspended or running at your feet, it moves between the sky and the ground, open to the gaze of passers-by or the public.
Often, the act, the action, is seen as a kind of sudden liveliness, a sudden start. His performances are much more so, exuding a certain nobility in the amplitude of the movements he chooses. A majestic serenity pervades the space around him, and there is a great contrast between those on the edge and Borgial in the centre, as if time has stood still for him. The energy is concentrated in the intensity of the gesture, not wasted on embellishments.
The ornamentation is reserved for the accessories that accompany him and take part in a dialogue with his body, emphasising this or that part of the gesture. Jewellery, headdresses and clothing are new signs added to the body’s main discourse.
A slowness of action operates, for example, during 𝑫𝑨𝑯𝑨𝑩𝑰𝒀𝒀 (1), a series of ‘long duration performances’, i.e. three acts of five hours each, co-organised with Violette Wood and presented in 2022 in Paris at 3537. In Act 1, Borgial is initially alone, asleep under kilos of sand, connected to the outside world by long braids, a veritable dune from which he emerges and cuts his braided cords, extracting himself from the material. Accompanied by two other figures during Act 2, he encounters different othernesses, the ancestor and the peer. Covered in gleaming armour, he becomes embodied in the sun for the final act.
𝑫𝑨𝑯𝑨𝑩𝑰𝒀𝒀 ACT III – Borgial & Leopold Trichter – Long-term performance and site-specific installation – 3537 (Paris) – November 2022
photo credits : Roy Brandys – Chahine Thomas
THE IMAGE
Borgial says that he usually visualises the form of the performances he designs from the outset. It’s like a sort of more or less clear vision, dictated by a main action, onto which he builds and grafts more context. Sometimes it’s a very clear overall image that he ‘sees’, which he simply adapts to the venue hosting the event.
But in all cases, to create these ‘tableaux vivants’, he surrounds himself with people, friends in particular, who take part in every stage of the design of the performances. These collaborations help him to flesh out and refine his ideas.
To bring his projects to fruition, he says he is obliged to collaborate because it is technically impossible to do it alone, and also because his performance practice is confronted by others. He sees this permeability as a source of enrichment for his work, on which those who accompany him make a discreet but decisive mark. He sees these encounters as almost of the order of destiny, touching on the spiritual.
La flamme ailée – Borgial – Performance – Solo exhibition AETERNA by Art 54 (Paris) – July 2023
photo credits : Benjamin Manguele
THE WORD
In his performance at Silencio, Socio Anthroporama, in September 2023, the soundtrack he composed sounded like a litany, a looped, hypnotic poem set against David Lynch’s backdrop. The words were about mouths, eyes, parents. About ourselves and others.
To explain his relationship with words, Borgial invokes orality. This is where he sees the origin of his love of storytelling. He evokes the figure of the griot, the embodiment of verbal transmission who is both storyteller and guardian of the word and of history. The griot is a guardian figure who accompanies and inspires him. He interprets a form of this concentration of collective knowledge in an individual, who perpetuates it, disseminates it and ensures that it is repeated from mouth to ear to mouth. Even as a child, he would tell stories while tracing shapes, combining gesture with speech. And then erasing everything like an evaporating dream.
Then there are the other narrative formats of childhood, oral and visual, series and films, gleaned in particular from television. Baby MTV, the iconography and composition of the music videos of the 2000s contribute to an imaginary world that he transcribes into the artistic direction of his pieces. A fusion of ancestral and contemporary inspirations, a skilful blend of legends and mythologies from different eras and origins. In 𝑫𝑨𝑯𝑨𝑩𝑰𝒀𝒀, the phoenix meets Saint Seiya, and during Socio Anthroporama, it’s Scheherazade who tells tales over and over again, under the club’s red and neon lights.
Her work is driven by an ambition to generate more encompassing narratives that take centre stage and underpin all her influences. So choosing to study literature was no accident. His practice has been enriched by linguistic knots and cuttings.
Poetic writing has also been with him for a long time. Excerpts of poems from 2012 to 2018 were used to compose the lyrics for the Socio Anthroporama performance. He explains that words allow him to bring out complex emotions and put them down, then embellish them, and perhaps understand them. A kind of thought performance.
This omnipresence of words is accompanied by their absence. No sound comes out of the mouth of the performer, but her voice resonates in the space, like a kind of omniscience, a diffuse, permeating perfume. Something on the order of intimacy shared by all the spectators.
Socio Anthroporama – Borgial – Performance – Silencio Club (Paris) Septembre 2023
THE SNAKE
I’m taking advantage of our first conversation to share with Borgial my curiosity about the recurrence of the snake in the landscape of contemporary works. Of course, I’m the one looking for them and trying to tie them up.
This peregrination began with Ouroboros, Borgial’s solo show, curated by Violette Wood, which opened at the Galerie du Crous on 5 October 2023.
The title brings back my references to alchemy, mainly from the manga ‘Full Metal Alchemist’. In Hiromu Arakawa’s graphic work, the tattoo worn by immortal beings embodies the 7 deadly sins, symbolising a dragon biting its own tail. Self-consumption as an eternal revolution. The beginning and the end embrace each other in a perpetual return to the origin and the end. If nothing is lost and nothing is created: everything revolves?
As Borgial retraces all the appearances of the snake in his work, he evokes childhood memories. A terrifying figure, codified as evil and diabolical. As he grew older, this terror subsided and was accompanied by a growing fascination. This mysterious reptile aroused a certain curiosity in him, although he was not yet completely at ease with it.
Today, he sets out a series of points of concordance between the cold-blooded animal and his practice. First of all, there’s the momentum. The sinuous movement, punctuated by points of support, which creates a trace. It’s also about a relationship with space, about a body that creates shapes in its environment by adapting its trajectory to obstacles. Perhaps Borgial ate a boa a long time ago. Now he is questioning and exploring all the signs and entities that accompany, inhabit or haunt his path.
Le Dôme de Fer -Borgial – installation in situ – OUROBOROS solo exhibition at the Galerie du Crous de Paris – cur. Violette Wood – October 2023 – photo credits: Galerie du Crous de Paris
Thank you to Borgial for agreeing to share this conversation about her practice.
(1) ‘The word “Dahabiyy” comes from Somalia (North-East Africa) and refers to gold in its national language, Somali’, extract from the summary of the project written by Borgial, 2022.
* vis vivas, Latin for ‘living force’, a term used to designate kinetic energy, i.e. the energy possessed by a body when it moves.
