(LA) HORDE
Founded 2013
(LA) HORDE is a collective of three French artists: Marine Brutti (b. 1985), Jonathan Debrouwer (b. 1985) and Arthur Harel (b. 1991). Together, they develop their practice through stage direction, filmmaking, video installation, choreography and performance. After creating a choreographic piece for Seniors (Void Island) and another one for future graduates of ECDMTL (Avant les gens mouraient) in 2014, the artists were invited to create a film and performance at the International Biennale of Design in Saint Etienne, France. This film, Novaciéries (2015), has been projected at the Centre Pompidou, IFFR, Slamdance and Clermont-Ferrand. In 2016, (LA) HORDE created a new show on Hard-Dances titled TO DA BONE, which won second prize at Danse Élargie at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris. The show had its premiere at the FTA festival in Montreal in 2017. Between 2016 and 2017, (LA) HORDE was commissioned to make a number of videos, including Larger Than Life in 2016 and Cloud Chasers for the Fondation d'entreprise Lafayette in 2017. The collective’s leitmotiv is to question and swap the codes of different artistic scenes for contemporary art and living art.
Larger than Life is the result of a four hour-long performance. The artists chose to drag out the length of production to suggest an intimate gathering that lasts several hours. Taking the idea of a family reunion as a point of departure, (LA) HORDE created a minimalist setting of a dinner table. As this dance-based video opens, men and women are seen gathered around the table. One by one, they gather on top of the table and begin to dance, directly engaging the viewer by approaching the camera and staring into it, seemingly energized by this outside engagement. Further exploiting the idea of voyeurism, (LA) HORDE included those watching the production of the video in the video itself: The audience was both assisting the video and participating in it. Throughout this time, the participants move both in unison and alone, producing a continuous movement in which the body can again and again reinvent itself. As the video ends, the table is folded up and taken away; the dancers are left frozen in place and seemingly together, but in their own thoughts. By using “datamoshing” during the editing process, the collective superimposed new designs, shapes and imagery upon existing ones in order to emphasize the concept of fluidity.
