Frozen

Through Frozen, Aurelio Mergola and Sophie Linsmaux delve deeper into the offbeat, audacious, and whimsical universe they’ve created by exploring the daily lives of two antiheroes.

At the heart of Frozen is an image : that of a butcher’s truck, open to reveal thick carcasses of meat hanging from hooks, then carried bloodied on the shoulder of a butcher. This image, beyond its aesthetic beauty, also speaks to the fragility of these butchered bodies, laid bare in an urban context. Witnessing this unloading in the middle of the street, this contrast between the intimate and the urban, the living exposed to the dullness, touches us. This tableau reflects our own condition as flesh-and-blood beings ; it makes us aware of a universe buried beneath the thick night of our body. A universe we scarcely know : our guts, our insides, our viscera.

Beneath our "clean" and controlled appearances, where nothing can break out or disturb, lies a mass of blood and bone, flesh and organs, a coherent jumble of viscera and tissues reminding us of the fragility of the human condition.

It is this universe, normally invisible, that we are eager to explore today. We have the desire to undress beyond the skin, to peel away again and again as if the other side of the stage were more meaningful than the stage itself.

On our stage, with Frozen, we strip the body of its outer layer, and in doing so, we reveal another facet of humanity, one buried in the intimacy of every person.