Electrify Everything

 Electrify Everything, Biennale NOVA_XX, Paris, FR (2024)

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 complete its circuit.
As the ruler of great cyclical metamorphoses, the earth is ready to welcome these celestial discharges as a token of sacrifice.
As a token of sacrifice.

Nuclear waste is also entrusted to its depths.

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

The tectonic, magmatic, and mineral structures undergo mutations.
Nevertheless, all these transformations are not without consequences.
Perhaps the stars in space are only matrical traces?
Bodies that have underwent the same alterations as the Earth today.
Earth today.

Electric charge is a fundamental property of matter.

The charge has no moral sensibilities.
The charge has no moral sensibilities.

It leaves it to the person in charge to discharge themselves, without this 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.)