Neurchi de Crassier is a show where participants are blending together thousands of Google comments about the place where the performance happen (could be a building, a city, a territory) to produce collective hermeneutic about this city and and to provoque a socio-linguistic tension. The performance was born in International Design Biennale in Saint-Étienne in april 2022 in one week, where we designed a protocol that was also used in Détroit (US) in june 2022. Our aim is to duplicate it in other cities, places or territories to produce a crossed archive of the pheromons that we drop online.
During the first days, participants are collecting Google comments of various places in their city, trying to have an open scope : they collect differents star rates, different tones, in differents urbanism zones. Later, we put together all the opinions, and we try a first collective reading. During this moment, we try to qualify all the items : who is speking ? How is the writing ? What are the singularities of the langage ? Does the person speaking seems to live in the neighborhood or being a visitor ? To who are they speaking : a Friend, an ubiquitous presence, familly, a tutelar figure or even a judge ?
Then, the hearth of the project can start : the dramaturgy. The collective starts a sequential montage between all the fragments, trying to provoque contradictions about the city, or unexpected successions. Like that, several frictions can happen, depending a lot of the location where the project is spreading : an old catholic « Google guide » can contemplate a Christian ornament in a church of the city center, and just after him we can hear someone claiming about the lack of frozen shrimps in a shopping center of the periphery. After the final cut, we invite inhabitants to a lecture, which can be collective or read by a solely reader. The performance is filmed and the reader(s) wears an inflatable reversed green screen, and in the archive we post-produce incrustation of pictures made by Google users about the places he/she is speaking about.