L’Acte pur Tristan Lavoyer & Andreas Hochuli

Serving as a base for the artists who will stage their concerts outside the confines of the Swiss Art Awards site, L’Acte pur’s space is both installation and promotional venue, part camp site and part sales stand for a local product at a regional fair. That hybrid character resonates in L’Acte pur, a music duo who use basic equipment for their performances: two microphones, two speakers and a mixer as well as two televisions playing a karaoke show, with the various song lyrics displayed on kitsch backgrounds in a range of cheesy fonts. The flawed aesthetic matches the way the songs are performed, with a mixture of skill and incompetence: the kind of “de-skilling” that is typical of karaoke. The outdated styles underscore the move into a new world where word processing is no longer the sole preserve of IT programs but is subject to various readings and rewritings by artificial intelligence. That destabilisation of textual integrity reflects shared fears of a loss of identity in a contemporary context where the concept of masculinity is being renegotiated.