Filippo Filliger & Dorothée Thébert /// BED-IN

Under a quilt, in a big bed, now public, you won't see John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but Filippo Filliger and Dorothée Thébert. Forty years after the 1960’s performance, this local couple reinvents the Bed-In. Like the mythical couple, they will make a claim for peace while in pyjamas. They will stay on display three days, until Monday evening, intoning : «on Monday, stay in bed! ». Let's stay in bed rather than to go to work, run around, and, above all, destroy each other on battlefields. A utopian message? A peaceful one, in any case. The 1960s Bed-In wanted to offer another vision of the world in the context of the Vietnam War and led to the recording of the song Give Peace a Chance. Forty years later, what would John Lennon think of the repercussions of their message, since the United States are still at war? Will Filippo and Dorothée, like the stars before them, receive hundreds of journalists interested in their opinion of today’s world ? Their performance, combining both daily life, and political, historical and artistic questions, is an update of the 1969 one which took place in Montreal. Aware of the fleeting aspect of their action, they will double its conceptual impact by existing simultaneously on Second Life [a contemporary comminication tool of the global village], in Fabiana de Barros’s FITEIRO CULTURAL SL. Therefore Bed-In will also exist on screen with the characters’ avatars, for a big party, beginning Saturday night which, inevitably, will lead to a long and late sleep-in the next morning. Both in real life and in virtual space –continuously screened at the bar – you are invited to participate in a general strike on Monday, staying in bed. . . Don’t be mistaken, Filippo and Dorothée’s performance is serious, although slightly humorous. It’s a democratic way to trigger reflection in an open and public setting and to take time to consider our sense of life and our daily tasks differently. The bar “Le Cabinet” lends its physical space and Fabiana de Barros – a cultural activist in Geneva– offers the virtual one on Second Life; allowing this metaphor, born with the hippie movement, to take place today in the context of the Mapping Festival.

Karine Tissot
 
 
FITEIRO CULTURAL © Fabiana de Barros. All art works reproduced with courtesy of the artists.
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