Gruppo Petrolio – Sabotage and Contamination - Saison 1

The exhibition TRANS(M)ISSIONS will presents a film in several episodes by Gruppo Petrolio, a moving and unfixed artists collective gathered around Lili Reynaud Dewar (winner of the 2021 Prix Marcel Duchamp). Lili Reynaud Dewar started teaching early. Her lectures at la HEAD in Geneva take the form of discussions, screenings, and dialogues outside of the school. “With the students, we are creating temporary collectives, which are to be constantly renewed and are not intended to last beyond their studies. I sincerely enjoy it. For a long time my class was called “Teaching like a teenager”: teaching is probably the only place where I can best escape from the normative and static dimension of the 'adult'”. For Gruppo Petrolio, the artist has worked since 2019 with students from the Ecole d'art de Genève as well as with students from the Ecole de Montpellier. Transmission, reinterpretation, improvisation: this collective experience immerses us into a soap opera thriller with Pasolini's text, Petrolio, as its anchor. Other texts, music and dance, references to political acts of sabotage, views of Grenoble’s mountains, industrial sites, a Roman trattoria are all elements of these episodes both scripted and improvised. In between fiction, documentary, telenovela, and experimental film, a game is in progress between the actors and their mentor in never-ending, contaminating forms of narration. Nine different episodes are presented in an environment designed by Gruppo Petrolio.

TRANS(M)ISSIONS offers an opportunity to think of art as an unfinished formal, conceptual, collective, and moving system. It insists on the notion of being together and of sharing as an artistic gesture.