The plants begin it. The performer follows.
La révolte botanique is a solo performance for living plants, capacitive touch sensing and live electronics. A group of plants is arranged on stage, each one wired as an electrode and lit from within by LEDs. Touching them — a leaf, a stem, the soil — is the only way the piece is played.
Contact registers as conductivity, and conductivity is never stable: it shifts with moisture, with pressure, with the state of the plant itself. The same gesture on the same leaf will not produce the same result twice. Sharp pulses rise from the plants against heavy, saturated synthesis, and the performance — improvised, around twenty-five minutes — follows wherever that instability leads.
The title names what the piece stages: the plants begin it. They are not instruments being operated but participants that initiate, and the performer rises with them rather than directing them. Over the course of the performance it becomes progressively unclear who is playing and who is being played.
Performances
Mise-En Festival, Concert IV · New York · June 2026
Röstibrücke, Cave12 · Geneva · 2024