Trained as a biologist, Olivier de Sagazan turned to painting and sculpture with a constant, visceral drive to explore organic life. His passion for breathing life into matter led to the creation of two powerful performances, both produced by Wart: Transfiguration and Something Happened to Us.
Something Happened to Us
On stage, a man—wired to numerous sensors—enters a towering two-meter-high test tube. He begins running in place as his real-time electrocardiogram charts his physiological state. His growing breath, bodily sounds, and fragmented voice are picked up by two live sound artists who shape the musical tempo in real time, as visuals and lighting respond directly to his bodily rhythms. In search of a “radicalization of the sensory experience,” the performer shares spontaneous thoughts aloud. His language falters, his alphabet disintegrates, and madness takes hold as he questions the origin of the words forming in his mouth. A profound alchemy emerges, suggesting a deep interconnection between the body and the cosmos. After years of clay-based performance works—most notably Transfiguration, with millions of views on YouTube—de Sagazan returns to his scientific roots for this visceral exploration of the body and its many connections.
Transfiguration
A landmark piece that launched Olivier de Sagazan into the performance art scene, Transfiguration has been performed over 350 times worldwide. Wearing a business suit, the artist enacts a ritual of relentless transformation, expressing his unfulfilled longing as a sculptor to give life to matter. In a dimly lit space, he covers his face and head with clay, letting paint-soaked hands shape and erase grotesque masks in a cycle of destruction and rebirth. The result is a bestial and monstrous hybridization—a vanishing of the human face to reveal deep, buried identities. As a living sculpture, de Sagazan growls and chants on the brink of coherence, molding his next metamorphosis while searching for the self beneath the masks, and for the hand pulling the strings. “I’m stunned by how people think it’s normal to be alive,” he says. “My whole aim is to reveal the sheer strangeness of being here. In art, disfiguration is my means of unlocking awareness through the raw power of the images that emerge.”