within POST ELETTRONICA
a project curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini

POST ELETTRONICA, curated by Valentina Gensini and Letizia Renzini, is an installations and performing arts special project that includes original creations, concerts, performances and installations by international artists who have gone beyond the electronic and digital mechanism towards a gestural and contaminated use of the new technologies.

Les Souliers (The Shoes) by Arno Fabre: thirty pairs of shoes, selected by audition, perform this work. The shoes are provided by generous donors or bought at the flea market; they all have known a wearer and have tread across grounds. They already tell a story. Through customized tramplers, the shoes can move with amazing personality that makes us forget their mechanical drives.
They hit, rub, hit & rub, rub & hit in rhythms that vary fast and slow, while also stepping up, down, forward, backward, and all stages in-between. A numerical Midi score guides the shoes precise movements. The composition, like in the selection of the shoes, is as much narrative as it is musical. It is an arrangement that is inspired from the raw sounds of an accumulation of individualized shoes. It can be considered a narrative work that evokes the wanderings of a singular man in certain passages, the rubbing of an unknown folk dance, the galloping of a youth gang, the determination of a military march, or even the independence of dissident foot falls in others.
Behind the burlesque character of these agitated shoes, we may also feel anxiety. An ambiguous feeling of fascination and fear, when talking about how we run the world. In orchestrating an ensemble of shoes, Les Souliers convene ghosts of former wearers and inevitably suggests their absence. In this way, we are confronted with a curious intermingling of dance incantation, contemporary music and derisory trampling.

Arno Fabre is a French eclectic artist who is in many ways unclassifiable. He claims to be “meticulous and even manic, persevering and even stubborn”. In addition, he is curious of the world. It is these traits that allow for an astonishing freedom of thought that draw connections between tractors, water taps, sounds, words, machines, contemporary dance, stone carving, photography, legislation, town planning and contemporary music.
Poetics and reflexivity, Fabre’s works move and jostle us into new relationships with the world. His sound installations (Dropper01, Les Souliers, Composition pour trois radios, Astragale Zénon) and his work on landscape, law, and the wild (Contre-nature, Lois et paysages, Tunning Landscape, Loup y es-tu?, Ne surtout pas l’ignorer, The Evergreen) have been presented in many places in France and in Amsterdam, Monaco, Barcelona, Courtrai, Mons, Geneva, Zagreb, Belgrade and St Petersburg.
He gratuated from the Ecole nationale supérieure Louis Lumière (photography) and Fresnoy – studio national des arts contemporains.

Les Souliers
from an idea of Sabine Petit and Arno Fabre
design, realization and composition: Arno Fabre
programming max/msp: Matthieu phillipon
electronic design: Francis Bras and Zandrine Chiri – interfaceZ
assistant producer: Liberty Castelin
production and diffusion: c15d
thanks to the donors of shoes and many thanks to Sabine for her advice, help and patience
Les Souliers are supported by the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, the city of Toulouse, le bbb, Bauer & Durin Réalisations and by Farnell France.