Ivana Müller
Conversations Hors-Champ

Taking place in "a colony" made up of ten or so tents Off-Field (2018) is an installation/performance performed by the spectators. These are the same tents that we are used to seeing in campsites or around lakes and beaches in the summer, but also in big cities, under bridges, along canals or in other 'edge' urban spaces, protected from view. In each of these tents there is a scripted conversation.

A spectator/participant enters a tent with another spectator/participant, preferably someone he or she does not know. They "just" start reading this conversation, away from the viewers, in the privacy of the tent. Even if they have a script to follow and there is nothing to improvise, it is the two readers who will really "write" what will happen in the time they spend together. Each tent proposes a new conversation, a new encounter by questioning our relationship to nature and to each other, the idea of survival, leisure, culture.

Hors-Champ was developed as part of IM's residency at the Glass Menagerie (Paris) and presented for the first time as a pilot project during the Carte Blanche Conversations shared on a long spring night in May 2017. The work was officially premiered in February 2018 at the 360 Degrees Festival, scène nationale La Passerelle, Saint-Brieuc (F) and has since been performed in various venues and festivals.