Herman Kolgen: dust never looked so good

Herman Kolgen is the kind of guy who’ll readily provide sound effects to give you a feel for what clusters of dust dispersing into the air to create a “beautiful chaos” look like. By the sound of it, it’s quite the eerie, otherworldly and, dare I say, dense experience. For the Montreal multidisciplinary maven, who’ll be premiering his immersive video performance Dust at this year’s Elektra festival, it’s all about taking vacuum cleaner trash, laying it out on a table, thrusting it into the air and recording more than 500 frames per second’s worth of dust manipulation.  

“I work with dust almost like it was pigments of paint,” says the artist. “To give way to new compositions, new ways of looking. An element that causes allergies and which people see as dirty can also be really gorgeous if you give it a second look.”

The impetus for these magnified video crumbs came to Kolgen when he stumbled upon Dust Breeding, an iconic still American photographer Man Ray had taken of his friend Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass…after it had collected a year’s worth of dust. “When I’m on tour and I’m waiting backstage, I spend a lot of time looking at floors,” confesses Kolgen. “Obviously, they’re never clean! There are some really awesome floors out there, and when I fell on Man Ray’s photo, it was like 1+1=2. It gave meaning and soul to my idea. I started paying even more attention to floors after that.”     

At the heart of Dust is Kolgen’s quintessential juxtaposition of chaos – of particles but also sound – with fleeting moments of harmony. That delicate balance also recalls Kolgen’s previous work Inject, which featured a naked man (local designer Yso, for those in the know) submerged in a humongous cistern, combating the pressure of extended oxygen depletion and the inevitable neurological transformations such a brutal experience has on the body. “I work a lot with matter, in its purest form. Whether it’s dust or a body makes no real difference. Yso became matter to me: he wasn’t a person, he didn’t have a story, he didn’t express himself. It was the raw human body in water, and its reactions.”

Inject has toured the planet over the past year. Elektra offers a rare opportunity to take in a retooled V.2 of Kolgen’s nail-biting experiment with the human body at its most vulnerable.

May 6 (Dust) and 7 (Inject V.2)
Usine C | 1345, Avenue Lalonde
elektramontreal.ca | kolgen.net