Electrify Everything

Electrify Everything, Biennale NOVA_XX, Paris, FR (2024) photo: Amélie Bouvier

The live performance ‘Electrify Everything’ translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity. The field of electricity has been developed, manipulated, and named for three centuries to control and apply it. 

‘Electrify Everything’ invites the audience to reflect on the structuring power of electricity and its relation to resources and exploitation. Pom Bouvier-b. and Marjolijn Dijkman use an experimental technique that brings the organicity back into a phenomenon that, by nature, through the displacement of elementary particles of matter, is dynamic and living. Together, they have developed experimental musical tools to play live with electric currents. They will create a sound composition using the electric charge of specific objects and devices as a medium, playing on the variations of magnetic fields. 

The visual contributions by Marjolijn Dijkman are produced with a high-voltage electro-photography technique in which the artist uses a discharge plate made of conductive glass with a tin coating, the same material used in touch screens. By making visible microscopic electrical interactions, electricity becomes an actor, adopting an almost animistic character. Besides these cinematographic images, Dijkman visually explores the language and visual identity of the terminology of electricity.

Jean Katambayi Mukendi wrote a text for the performance based on the language of electricity. The units of electricity create different chapters that explore the history and the current state of energy production in an associative and poetic interpretation of electric terminology. Trained as an electrician, his works are part of a search for solutions to social problems in Congolese society and the country’s depletion of its enormous energy resources. The recorded text is read and performed by François Makanga.

Charge

Lightning seeks a passage,
to release its charge and close its circuit.
As the overseer of great cyclical metamorphoses,
the Earth is prepared to receive these celestial discharges,
as a token of sacrifice.

We also entrust its depths with our waste… nuclear waste.

For the Earth, a great NEUTRAL body,
knows how to reorganize all its data and restore a certain equilibrium,
and restore a certain working balance.

Tectonic, magmatic, and mineral structures undergo their mutations,
yet none of these transformations occur without consequence.

Perhaps the stars in space are only matrix traces.
Bodies that have undergone the same alterations as the Earth does today.

Electric charge is a fundamental property of matter.
Charge has no moral sensitivity.
It leaves to the person “in charge” the task,
of discharging themselves,
without weighing on their conscience.

Fragment from the text by Jean Katambayi Mukendi translated from French to English.

Teaser for ‘Electrify Everything’ recorded at Framer Framed without live projection (1:42 min.)