Artist Samuel Fasse and Sound Designer Michel Gaubert Speak on Creating Art Ecosystems

Photography by François Quillacq

Styling by Margaux Dague

In 2017, the young artist Samuel Fasse presented Le Regard Ailleurs, “The Look Elsewhere,” an immersive work at the Palais de Tokyo parallel to Paris’ fall fashion week lineup. The exhibition simultaneously marked the Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp graduate’s debut collection and the emergence of his hybrid practice, and Fasse emerged as a wunderkind of performative practices. Since then, he has challenged the very notion of singular autership, immediately dissolving into collectives and collaborations.

Fasse’s exhibition was a Gesamtkunstwerk—what the art world calls a total body of work—a spectacle that moved between the real and the unreal, the physical and immaterial, and the plastic and the virtual. Unlike other immersive art installations, the viewer experienced a punctum—a fracture in space and time—because they could view the performer but not what the performer themself viewed. Both performer and audience shared the same room yet existed in separate realities. The recorded video of the performance moves between the subjects in a 3-D virtual world, with the piece’s musical composition as the one guiding thread that both viewer and performer share. Thus, music is central to Fasse’s collaborative force, which includes dancers, other artists, textile producers, craftsmen, and other luminaries from the Paris underground club and ballroom scene.

JUSTIN POLERA: Michel has said that sound is a visual experience. What does that mean to you both?

MICHEL GAUBERT: I think that music is the aural companion of a fashion show. The whole show is basically an image that you are constantly creating. The music brings another image. You take one image that is red, and you put the music that makes you think yellow, so maybe the result is going to be orange on blue. It’s a juxtaposition.

SAMUEL FASSE: It’s funny because when I first met you, Michel, one of our first conversations was me explaining my art practice to you. What you just translated—the idea of juxtaposing these different elements so that they become something more—is similar to my vision or art. I want to exhibit the global picture of my practice, but it is nice to have something more physical on top of something that is more abstract.

MG: When you see a movie you remember the soundtrack, and when you remember the soundtrack you see the movie in your mind. Especially for me—there are so many fashion shows that I remember from their music.

SF: Yes, that is true, sound can transport us. When I try to build ecosystems, it is really like the bodies become their own triggers. It is a real time musical composition making on its own. You remember, Michel, I used to work with [musician Jackson Fourgeaud, aka] Jackson and His Computerband. We constituted a lexicon of sounds and afterwards they collapsed together. From there I began making music through gesture.

JP: Since the 1990s, the term “authenticity” has come under fire, and even the notion of the fashion designer as a “great auteur” has unraveled. Brands have become more than just the vision of one artist, and the very idea of collaboration has changed. Michel, there was a huge shift in the world, including the birth of the Internet, during the very time you began first collaborating with Karl Lagerfeld.

MG: Music-wise, the Internet was not really happening until the mid ‘90s or even early 2000s. I remember I was in New York in 2001, working on a show that was eventually cancelled. A week later they decided to reinstate it, but the music still was not finished. I had to send it from Paris and the provider had to go to some office or wherever to get more broadband to receive it. It took 45 minutes to send 10 minutes of music. In the mid-2000s, however, everything changed. We got immediate access to so much. It is very random what you can find online. You see a lot of things, you can hear a lot of things, you read things all in a different way. We all basically became our own editors.

JP: Do people today see everything on the Internet as copyright-free? Everyone can just use whatever they like?

MG: It should be copyright-free, because otherwise everything will be copyrighted. People will copyright the models and even the people sitting in the front row. Life cannot exist this way. Everything would be extremely flat.

SF: Because I grew up with the Internet, I really never had any of those experiences with copyrights. It is already stressful for me to find any elements of my work on the web! web! In truth, I never think about this when I’m working on a pitch. I’m all for collaboration and spreading my work on the web as far as it can go. I am also using new technologies in my work. People all over might grab onto one of the pieces and maybe use it for something else unintended. I remember one day a friend was working in a creative office in Asia and tracking what was trending in the world. He wrote to me: “Oh my God, one of your performances is being broadcast in Korea right now.” I was like, Oh fuck me. You know, that is intense. At that moment I realized that one of my artworks could be shown and experienced anywhere. Work can spread across the globe in a way that you as the artist cannot control. In my work there are intimate moments that I share in the time and place they happen, and the experience afterwards is out of my hands. You don’t know what the causality is going to be: negative or positive.

MG: Fashion is experiencing a lot of backlash because of the people that follow it. What we do, I do for myself and the people I work with. And it’s the same for you. We think what we do is good, and we defuse it. There are people who are going to follow and understand, while others will look at you and think they understand you, but they don’t. It’s the same on Instagram, where I post lots of pictures, some of which I have taken myself and some that I don’t know where they came from. I once posted a picture of a dog and the creator of the image got super mad at me: “You’re stealing my work. This is a picture I took.” He told me I should delete it and be reported to Instagram. I asked him to let me tag him in the credit with a courtesy line. Why do you have to get so upset about owning a picture of your dog on the beach? Why does he put an image out there if he does not want people to take it?

JP: You are both very open about being queer artists or creators. What does that mean to you in 2020?

MG: Being a queer artist in 2020 means the same to me as being a queer artist—if I can call myself an artist—in the ‘90s. I never came out, I never had to come out. I think it’s very important to be who I am and not care about what people think of me. I don’t care about you. Sometimes I don’t go to Pride because I am not the front-line activist shouting for my rights, but I do my share. I let people know who I am in everything I do; there is no duality. And it’s important that people know I am queer, because also it helps a lot of people. That’s why I’m saying it quite openly. It’s important that people are very open. You are your own person, and that is what is most important to me.

SF: I am always working with people close to me. I often have Trans and POC performers in my work, and people always ask me what I’m trying to say with that. They think I am making commentary on transgender issues with my performance, and I am not. The performers are my friends, first of all, and if I wanted to talk about that I would do so in another way. At this time in history, my friends and I have the free will to be who we are—in Paris at least. Everyone wants to put you in a box, for you to reassure them that you have a category. Somehow this makes people feel safer. I do not accept categories.

MG: When you look at the state of the world, people are being stripped of basic rights. We are in 2020 and I wish we had gone further than where we are now. On one side of the spectrum, we’re fighting and people are becoming more open. On the other side, people want to put everything back into a closet. I am not a fighter, but by putting my taste forward I hope I can make a change in the world.

GROOMING Fidel Fernandez
PHOTO ASSISTANT Yvonne Dumas Milne
STYLIST ASSISTANT Lea Sanchez
SHOOT ASSISTANT Lilly Gray
LOCATION Poush Manifest