“Even if he did not get any musical education, he practices it since he discovered that he could compose with his own computer.
With Luca Bonanno, he founded the Lonely Life Lovers Club, a music
label which has evolved in a collective to release cassettes, CDs and promote events.
The sound is leading his performances. He uses audio signals to help his
actors to act and react.
He likes to blend over mediums and techniques inside his performances
in order to improve them, and he records them. For these, he hires both
professionals and amateur actors. He gives them simple indications, gestures, acts to follow.
This is how he created L’Abeille Coule with Les chevaliers du lustre to perform it.
He likes the D.I.Y so much that he sophisticates a sort of clumsiness art.
He isn’t insensitive to idiocy, not even as a teenage way of joking.
With a lot of handcrafting (duct tape and glue), vamped objects, cardboard
in abundance, approximative costumes, masks and exaggerated gestures,
he mocks and caricatures solemn behaviours and powerful positions. He
crafts everything, nothing seem to restrict him, even an inflatable T-Rex
costume in order to dance a slow with a ghost wearing a hard hat.
During
a residency at Le Wonder with Luca Bonanno, they mingled a clown and
the riot police.
He nurtures fanciness, likes the festive and the odd. Yet in the titles: La
mort de Ferdi (The death of Ferdi), Cache cache à la frontière belge (Hide
and seek at the belgian frontier) or Bicravmaga Chouravparti (NB: a contraction of “bicrave” (selling things), “krav-maga”, “chourave” (stealing) and
“rave party”) that he names performance-show.
Julien Carpentier mingles voguing (dance movement born in the 70’s in
the black community, inspired by gestures from the Vogue magazine), to
childhood by using pinatas or slips and slides, popular animations, escape
games; using trickery, clues and enigmas as a common thread.”
Jean Pierre Ostende, 2018, text for the exhibition La vallée de l’étrange.