a wonderful weekend, singapore

an interview with Bertrand Peret and Sandrine Llouquet of Wonderful District, by Ng Yi-Sheng. For details of the event, at 72-13 home of Theatreworks today and tomorrow until 3am, click here.

Let's dance > Bertrand, Sandrine, why did you decide to structure Wonderful Weekend as a party? We like to mix art and life in our project; or art and party. Bertrand is more in the life part and I'm more in the «boring» art part :) One of the most exciting and creative fields of this last decade is situated around electronic music and its contexts >>> thinking a space and how people will move into it You've been boyfriend/girlfriend since 1998, and began the Wonderful project in France in 2000 It was the natural continuation of our work. In my art work I question the locations of exhibition, the context, the public I started in 1996 in my apartment in Bordeaux. Every month for 2 years I was inviting one "project" (artist or group) to invest my space 72 hours non-stop... By existing, artworks demonstrate that everyone can choose to get his own point of view, even if it seems «abnormal» I like to use Hakim Bey's famous idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, utopian insofar as it believes in the intensification of everyday life, or, as surrealists would have put it, «a penetration of life by the marvellous».

Why did you decide to move to Vietnam in 2005? To give a new impetus to our activities. My parents are Vietnamese and I came for one year as a student at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts University. I felt a enormous dynamism, an energy, a desire to progress that doesn't exist anymore in France yes!!! I think the difference is that in France, people are looking at the past that's it!!! and here they are looking at present, looking at the future... Here in VN, the traffic, how people are driving their motorbikes helped me to understand their way of working, thinking, moving forward; they never use their rear-view!!! So you formed Wonderful District, to stimulate contemporary art in Vietnam. But you've had setbacks: Rendezvous, the first incarnation of Wonderful, was cancelled for sponsorship reasons we have to ask for licences for every kind of art event. It is also very difficult to convince a sponsor to pay for something that has no precedent (that was the last answer of our sponsor).

You'll be showing French and Belgian as well as Vietnamese artists The contemporary art community we know here is very multicultural. The group we formed (Mogas Station) is representative Friendship is so important in any situation >>>> (8 artists including Vietnamese, German, French, Viet-French, Viet-American, Viet-Japanese) I believe in small groups, tribes, crew...>>> We want to bring new things to see and hear in Asia, we start with what we know... This is the exchange zone I do not believe in any nationalism; in our digital civilization it has less and less meaning...

Wonderful is an experiment of situation, of moments, of meetings We believe that there are a lot of people who doesn't care about contemporary art only because they have never seen contemporary art mixing architecture, design, music, Contemporary creation mixes competences ephemeral contexts the border between these forms is less and less clear graphism, communication , video, life, light, food...

Your life's work We realise that doing small things can have a big impact. Curating is necessary to enlarge choices, to multiply points of view and their representations. We still believe that art can change the world. We believe in a wonderful one...