Fabrice Montal is the program director for Antitube, a cinema, video and electronic arts exhibition center that is quite active in Quebec City. He has programmed and supervised around a hundred and ten thematic events since 1996. Since the year 2000, he is also the program director for the Festival of the 3 Americas ( formerly Images du nouveau monde). He is a musician and a member of the multimedia groups Eltractor and the Le grand orchestre d'Avatar.

Installations Program by Fabrice Montal

Performance Program by Fabrice Montal


Le désert et la répétition
Fragments criblés en inachèvement répété

"Every desert begins with a grain of sand."
Repetition has been a form of creation for a long time. One need only think of stencils, bronze, engraving, mantras, the canon, the two points inscribed at the end of music sheets, or on a more ironic note the small indication to repeat a 840 times placed in the upper left margin of Erik Satie's Vexation score.

"The desert is in it origins at the heart of repetition."
In the same way that the work of art underwent a major upheaval in its meaning and nature
with the arrival of mechanical (i.e. industrial) reproduction.

"The desert is the inverted face of the night which covers it, the night riddled with light that is mirrored in its constellations of oases of life."
The most critical were worried about art's regenerating capacities and in a way foresaw its end.

"The verb is the essence of the desert for those who do not know how to read."
Photography and the record player increased the load. The cinema and the tape recorder arrived with film and tape, and the loop closed upon itself. From hereon one could join the alpha and the omega of a work and witness its joyous repetition.

"And philosophy without a reader loses its meaning at the heart of its blossoming orations."
The artist could finally take the time to live, or another cocktail of an equally exotic taste, while his/her work took shape by itself.

"The desert escapes."
"From mirage to mirage, one loses one's substance and yet everything moves forward, everything converges."
By force of having had it repeated, we have finished by accepting that repetition is the best way to get something into even the most idiotic of minds.

"It is a chaos of organization, an organization of chaos."
Any advertising person will tell you that hammering the mind shapes the consciousness of the consumer and directs his/her distractions and decisions. In this way s/he imitates a process of breakdown applied by nazi concentration camp guards to turn their victims into spineless and amorphous beings by removing any taste for another existence, by smothering even the slightest glimmer of hope.

"At the same time, it is an extremely strong space of meditation, which excludes, and absorbs and transmits everything all at the same time."
The Fordist-Taylorist couple made their contribution by applying protocols and optimization to the standardization of living conditions. But, paradoxically in today's post-fordism and post-taylorism, to the extent that they impose a status quo and generate a personal and collective forgetting, repetition generates its downfall for it contributes to the destruction of social forms that supported it as a vector of power and as a life mold.

"In the desert plenitude comes from emptiness."
Everything that is prefabricated and pre-finished is already dead.

"In the desert space negates its horizon. Through the repetition of mirages, time evaporates and forgetting grows."
The replication of the same without a feedback effect is the death of individuality. Replication is death inscribed within life, because variety is the guarantor of the living. If soldiers are uniform it is because their death becomes more tolerable when they appear to be interchangeable. Historical memory dies when there are no more exceptions.

"In the desert, the wind empties meaning."
In its current form, the repetition of human production and waste will inevitably lead to the desert. The desertification of the world is its fictionalization and its de-realization.

"We have met great mystics prostrate in ecstasy and filled with wonder in front of the incredible perfume of a sand rose."
Late capitalism has developed counter to nature. Its dynamic is exponential.

"It is also a call to contemplation because the violent truth of the desert will not immediately appear to us."
Quotation is at the heart of new power that is establishing itself. The power of sampling and Globalization are one and the same. To repeat is the act undertaken when one has forgotten everything. "The simulacrum of the Phoenix will end up as ashes in the middle of the desert."
The artist no longer holds demiurgic power, s/he has become its distributor.
"The desert is a profoundly dialectical state which is both its recto and verso: an out-of-place place. The less one offers the choice, the more one justifies the existence of a monopoly, the more it needs to eradicate any trace of an imagination nourished by an historical, anthropological and sociological memory and perspective. The devaluation of these sectors within university curricula follows the same curve as the rise of industrial monopolies, the disappearance of living species, the leveling of cultures and the standardization of the social. Death has become the new frontier.

"This is where the hermit founds his utopias."
The fragment is henceforth viewed as a survival tactic, as well as deconstruction
and improvisation without pre-established models.

"I am looking for Akaba in the middle of the desert which has been constructed for me by expert planners."
At the heart of repetition the desert can be born at any time."

Fabrice Montal