Marie-Caroline Hominal - EUREKA IS ALMOST THE TITLE /Performance

In her works, Marie-Caroline Hominal often embodies animals or fictional figures that she borrows from cultural traditions as well as from pop culture and the world of cartoons.

The piece with the eloquent and, at the same time, knowing title, Eurêka, c'est presque le titre (2021), begins with the retelling of a dream in which she plays chess with John Cage. The inspiration for this also comes from the biography of Jean Tinguely. She speaks of Cardi B or Lewis Hamilton as contemporary equivalents of Niki de Saint-Phalle or the Swiss racing driver Jo Siffert. The dance-like game with abstract forms is accompanied by depictions of characters, which include a female figure – somewhere between a witch and a Mexican La Catrina, a tiger and an indefinable, shimmeringly hairy creature that oscillates between object and living being. And, all the time, Hominal brings these fabulous and fantasy figures up to date with the help of gestures and a repertoire of movements taken from every day and pop culture.

Movement and circularity as prerequisites for our existence that are symbolically present as the sun and the moon – the latter evoked by the round, silvery dance floor – underlie the presented cycle. Body, sculpture and celestial bodies unite in dance and movement. The eternal and permanent, as represented by these heavenly objects, combine with the here-and-now, the contemporary spectacle, to form a machine infernale.

During the performance, the artist appears with a range of objets trouvés. As the spectacle continues, these begin, as if by chance, to form an installative assemblage. And the term assemblage can also be used to describe the conception of the piece itself: The sequences that Hominal herself labels as numbers successively fit together to form a colourful and harmonious overview of a moving and tragicomic imaginary world: a cosmic circus between show business and avant-garde art.

Text from Dr Sandra Beate Reimann, curator Museum Tinguely – Bâle