BENJAMIN LOYAUTÉ
THE MELODY OF SPEECH

NUIT BLANCHE 2022
SAINT-EUSTACHE CHURCH
PARIS, FRANCE

Born in Normandy in 1979, Benjamin Loyauté is known for his research and work centered around reflections on the immaterial and the future of our societies. He explores the value of the ordinary and the notions of common good.

He is particularly interested in the ways in which our faculties of perception are appropriated, and our attention captured. His work examines the magical and political status inherent to the ordinary within our contemporary societies through a variety of mediums ranging from film and sculpture to public interventions and installations.

In 2016, he represented the French Pavilion at the first Utopia by Design: London Design Biennale at Somerset House. Over the past few years, he has been working on an epic, never-ending, ever-changing piece – What have you found out so far? – that combines a number of different mediums. From the very beginning, his research has focused on acts of languages. His work is closely bound to social sciences, phenomenology, fables, and kōans. He has been pursuing work on the WeArtChange series for a number of years now, an initiative that aims to connect with children living in poverty through creativity.

In 2015, he curated Hypervital, an exhibition that was hailed as a decisive moment and key turning point in his practice as an artist.

Since then, he has been honing his own style of artistic intervention. His works have been showcased in a number of venues and institutions: MAMAC-Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Saint Etienne); MUDAM & Casino Contemporary Art Center (Luxembourg); MoMA(New York); Palazzo Clerici & Del Stelline (Milan); Power Station of Art (Shanghai); the Baalbek archaeological site (Lebanon); Parco Archeologico Selinunte (Sicily); Palais de la Porte Dorée – Musée de l’Immigration (commissioned by Rubis Mécénat for the Nuit Blanche Paris 2018); Ithra-King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Saudi Arabia); Kanal-Centre Pompidou, Fondation Boghossian (Brussels), and beyond.

THE MELODY OF SPEECH

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Nuit Blanche event on Saturday 1 October 2022, Rubis Mécénat invited artist Benjamin Loyauté to take to the Saint-Eustache church in Paris for a very special performance. The Melody of Speech unfolds like a contemporary fable, rooted in the UN’s World Charter for Nature, which is celebrating 40 years of existence in 2022.

Defined by the poetry of the ordinary, the work of Benjamin Loyauté depends on the activation of his works, the mutual coupling of sculpture and performance in order to exist. Here, the performance potential is marked by the physical presence of a sculptural circular base, which itself can only be read as such through the implicit presence of the objects that complete it or of an interpreter performer who could stand on it. Rather than thinking of sculpture and performance as diametrically opposed, Loyauté imagines them as “actants” that come together to form a living and dynamic whole that invites experience and engagement. The Melody of Speech relocates our aention and imagines a dubplate, a psalm that is both frank and poetic sometimes delivered at light speed, oen mixed with punk surrealism and invisible street music, chiseled like his sculptures of meditations composed of signs, traces of birds or sacred germinations.