Meryll Hardt

P003 → Installations - performances.

PIXEL SUNRISE

Interactive video installation
Conception / scénographie : Meryll Hardt.
Programmation : Johan Lescure (Touch designer).
(c) Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains.
Exposition : Panorama 16. (2014)

A slow, patient progression reveals the image, subject to a gradual, fragile revelation of the portrait through a square of polarizing filter. The interactive installation allows visitors, alone or in a group, to experience a back and forth movement between fixation and dissolution of their image. Each presence in the space is interconnected, and the movement of one affects the representation of another. A choice must be made: to stand still and appear clear, or to move and bear witness to one's energy in motion. Two possible existences for the digital self.

The keystone of the installation stands in a detachment between an LCD screen and its polarizing filter, which has been torn off to be distanced and divided into hanging squares in space, available to visitors who are filmed and reprojected in real time.
The image of the visitors appears to them in the frame, while the screen remains a monochrome of white light, blind to any presence.

In the midst of digital flux and tension, Pixel Sunrise takes us back to the beginnings of photography, to subjects petrified and waiting to be immortalized. It's the opposite of the selfie, you have to wait to see yourself in focus, but you can also stay in motion as a flow of energy. Born out of a questioning of the return to sight through artificial digital retinal transplants, Pixel Sunrise takes a broader look at the return to visual perception, to the sensation of light in motion, to the sensation of light alone, which on the best of days reactivates dreams of sunsets.

ON THE OTHER HAND

Video installation.
Genk, 2011.

Vennestraat Hidden Places and Identities
Genk Manifesta 9 - Parallel event (Belgium)
Co-curatoria : Michela Saccheta & Fransceca Berardi.

Meryll Hardt was told the story of a young Italian woman who came to Genk (Belgium) with her family in the mid-1960s, just as the first mine crises and strikes were beginning. It is said that this young woman spent a lot of time imagining that her sister, who had stayed in Italy, was finally just behind the hedge of her garden.

The video installation project therefore depicts two characters, one in Genk and the other in Liguria and Lombardy. One video shows the young immigrant who lives and works in Genk as a cleaner in the C-mine, but also as a manager of a closed cinema where some of the posters have turned yellow. The action takes place in 2012, but it is not fully revealed, she seems more like a pre-1968 figure. Like the young woman in the original story, she is associated with some of the symbols of her homeland. In the second video, her twin sister, who stayed in Liguria, appears in a much more dreamy rhythm. Her routine faces the melancholic journey of her sister. This second figure, the Italian sister, is at the edge of the frame. She observes Italia, re-enacts memories, typical scenes and clichés (the aesthetics of a postcard). A tour that begins and ends in the bedroom - and the view that a bed can offer through an open window.

LIGNE OBSCURE

Premiere of the performance / dispositif électro-acoustique.
Eglise de la Sainte Trinité, Bruxelles, 2011.

Guided by the sound of her footsteps, the blindfolded performer follows the white line in the dark. The soles of her sneakers are covered with Velcro to adhere to the line of complementary fabric. The sound is captured by a wireless cravat microphone attached to the ankle, amplified and broadcast through the church's speakers, with only natural reverberation.

Expanding the sound of the effort, it induces the difficult separation in between the person and the ground. The constraint brings both imbalance and support to walking. Evoking Bruce Nauman's minimalist historical performance, sports and religious iconographies, the performance is an attempt to create an act inspired by the medieval " jugements de Dieu ".

Ligne Obscure has been performed in various venues, such as the new courthouse of Liège or a desafected zoo, at Zooart (Cuneo - It). But the Holy Trinity Church was the place where the performance blossomed the most, in terms of meaning and echo.

OFFICE NATIONAL DES VACANCES ANNUELLES

Performance/installation/vidéo.
Residency and collective exhibition at Office National des vacances.
Bruxelles, 2010.

Meryll Hardt spent a week in the premises of an administration that organizes holidays for workers and artists, she invested the ground floor of the administration, a former mutual that closed its doors to become an art gallery, she went to the basement of the building where a civil servant gave me some old furniture with which I could revive the place.Inspired by Jacques Tati's "Playtime" (1967), I ended up playing this fictional character by improvising things, guided by intuition, looking for clues about the character. I still don't know exactly who she was, but this video is like her last day at work.

Step by step, as she spent days in this unplugged office space, like the unemployed former civil servant, she began to wonder which character would have work here. Making art instead of administrative tasks, during working hours she sometimes had to greet visitors looking for this or that office where they had an appointment, not minding that she was standing on her desk singing and improvising rhythmic accompaniments with a stapler or a calculator.

DUO IMPOSSIBLE

Vidéo, loop, performance, one shot.
Bruxelles, 2010.

Improvisation inspired by "Playhouse", by Buster Keaton (1921).

OUT OF OFFICE

Performance, video and music/sound composition.
Bruxelles, 2009.

A long-term project conceived in the 1950s to centralise the Belgian administration along the lines of La Defense in Paris, the Administrative City is a tabula rasa that breaks with the dynamism of the Botanical popular district. Its construction site has been a wasteland for years, often the scene of free parties, video clip (ex : Headhunter, Front 242).
The soundtrack for the first video was inspired by one of the buildings, the former Civil Servants Restaurant, whose sawtooth skyline guided my choice of waveform on my Kawai Teisco synthesiser. The second video, inspired by office breakdowns caught on security camera, is a performance in which the kettle and keyboard start the show.

TRAMIFICATION SYNCOPEE

Video, loop, 4' 2008. Bruxelles.

"Tramification syncopée", by Emile Souply, is a 70s retro-scientific sculpture located on the decks of the Botanique metro station in Brussels. As I explored its colorful network of tubes along a tiled wall, I imagined it as a photocopier that could reproduce my presence and allow different characters to meet. The result echoes my experience of retro games, turning a 3D environment into a 2D platform. The soundtrack for this video work was created after field recordings in the metro station, focusing on the looping movement of the escalators.

“NOT DRY, DO NOT TOUCH”

Drawing, impression and installation/perfromance
Erg, 2009. Bruxelles.