As Mallarmé wrote, « Every thought is a throw of the dice », and the game of chance becomes the game of numbers, OVNi in 2024 celebrates the tenth edition of an adventure. Since 2015, this balancing act has been offering a wide-screen playground of vertigo and mastery. The proposals developed by OVNI and its partners are from the outset a pooling of suggestions and creations. They animate and punctuate the festival, providing a highly entertaining score and an interlude in the festival field.
Play is a universal phenomenon, a constructed and fundamental experience of social and cultural life. The art of play does not exist without rules, whether tacit or explicit, and it involves conforming to or thwarting them. Play, from improvisation to strategy, from wordplay to role-playing, implies a saving distancing.
In a playful vein, Le Grand Jeu is a title* that sounds like a credo, a device reminiscent of the ‘performative’ dimension of video art. This dimension combines endless variations for an experience of diversions and aesthetic equivocations or didactic throws.
Above all, the way you play is just as important as the rules. Playing means inventing, it means indulging in creative energy, which sometimes means taking risks. In play, there is inevitably otherness, even in solo, we invent the other. Playing is about replaying what was, what is happening to us and what will happen in the future, while our age creates the idea of lack and downfall.
OVNi is a subtle and generous departure from everyday life. But let’s leave a little room for play, because surprises could well emerge from the interstices. It’s a proposal for going beyond the limits of the rules and rediscovering the emancipating quality of art.
