HitStories
Maïté Chénière & Anna Tje
Codes to keep burning

A year and a half after the second edition of the Archipelagogo Club at the Théâtre de l’Usine in January 2020, a performance fuelled by resilience and flamboyance as the first lockdown was approaching, Anna Tje and Maïté Chénière have continued for HitStories their exploration of the use of sound and electronic voice as a space of emancipation and healing for archipelagic bodies.

Through their conversations, the artists have nurtured an occasional practice of sharing mantras, films and music, as if to support each other at a distance. Their work, which is situated between performance and immersive installation, took the form of a duo performance at HIT. The performance was a testimony of their correspondence, conceived as a poetic dialogue between soundscape and enchantment, during which they shared the affirmations resulting from their discussions, their favourite films or readings.

After their performance at HIT, their intervention continued to inhabit the exhibition space in the form of a sound installation, conceived as a meditative space where participants bodies could lie down on cushions in the shape of plum stones.

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HitStories is

A desire to (re)generate non-hegemonic stories

The honouring of embodied practices, knowledge, experiences, beliefs, stories, myths, dreams, theories and fiction internalised individually or collectively

An emphasis on the instinctive, the irrational, the ambiguous, the unconscious, the unspoken, the unsure and the speculative

the celebration of new personal mythologies

A focus on the therapeutic and restorative dimension of sharing and transmitting these stories

An interest in the process that underlies in an artistic approach

A look at how these stories take shape, become concrete, perceptible, tangible, visible, at the crossroads of visual, textual, bodily, oral and sonic forms of expression

Careful attention to listening, to resonance, to echoes

A desire to share moments of physical encounters

A reflection on the archive of these shared moments, on the trace they leave, on the memories they create

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HitStories is a program of performative events and workshops taking place at HIT, a Geneva-based art space, between May 2021 and April 2022. Each episode of HitStories highlights, over a few days, the practice of an artist at HIT. Events (conversations, workshops, etc.) aimed at deepening the research carried out by the artists accompany their performative intervention.

HitStories is supported by Pro Helvetia, la Loterie Romande, la Ville de Genève, la fondation Leenaards, le Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain, DCS, Genève and la Fondation du Jubilé de la Mobilière Suisse Société Coopérative.