Technique de la schizophrénie

We may look at the installation Technique de la schizophrenie as an evolution of De Bemels last video, Techniques de survie en solitaire. Here again we have the masked character called Bonhomme Daniel, the solitary and lazy boy who spends his life in silence. This time he’s a 3-dimensional full-size showroom dummy representing, as usual, De Bemels himself.
But if in the last video the events this character was living in his house were, in a certain way, ironic, witty and surreal, in Technique de la schizophrenie De Bemels uses the charachter’s mask as a screen where to project the painful declarations of a women who tells the story of his son and his mental illness. Everything is frozen: Bonhomme Daniel, as a dummy, is sitting paralyzed in his armchair, trapped himself in the same metamorphosis that has afflicted the guy of the story.
De Bemels in this work faces the question of the loss of identity, the drama of the mental diseases, giving space to the documentation of a first-person narrative and turning his “creature”, Bonhomme Daniel, in a metaphorical way: a deaf, dumb, unrecognizable perfomer as we had never seen before.

(Elena Marcheschi)