Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Video creation and design

Artist, video maker, producer and vj (VJ Le Projectionniste), he has worked on cinematographic support and sculpture in installations before dedicating himself to the video-graphic image in various spaces and practices (Exhibitions, installations, documentary creation, dance, stages various musicals). He is both a designer of participatory audiovisual proposals within the social sphere, a collaborator with choreographers and musicians, and one of the leading VJs on the international scene. It considers the image as an element of mediation and powerful narration, beyond the classic models of the audiovisual economy.

Stéphane Abboud coordinates video workshops at Bordeaux Montaigne University in the visual arts and design section. For several years he has participated in international stages with film and video media, in addition to developing image architectures for stages in performances and live performances.

His Lebanese origins and the possible connections that may occur with his European daily life are continually being questioned. Between a feeling of rootlessness and the need for an identity construction, his desire is to ask questions, present views away from traditional topics about roots and integration, away from pre-established sociocultural patterns.

It does not exhibit, in its facilities, the cinema of the international market. In fact, he collects Super 8 movies, cheap today and very popular in the 70s. His selections basically cover the entire repertoire of this intimate practice that continues to be ignored, due to its ancient proliferation and lack of media coverage. , as a potential art.

The images it projects are also simple because they are taken from reality, already known unconsciously, and the fact of systematically projecting them in a loop accentuates its relationships with collective memory. The more you see them, the more they become obvious and intriguing at the same time. Repetition is present for different reasons, but it exists above all in the content of each image, projected over and over again.

By inciting the viewer to produce new and necessary gestures for the complete appearance of the work of art, Stephane Abboud's work is interactive, and that interactivity is "alive" because it is full of coincidences, actually experienced by the viewer, in the same way as a situation in your daily life. Here it must be specified, to avoid amalgamation with the works of relational aesthetics theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud, that the works of Stephane Abboud do not consist in putting a banal situation out of context, which essentially amounts to questioning and experimenting with sociological characters, but rather in a flagrant transformation of images and objects of banality. However, the relational character in the sociological sense is still present. On the one hand, interactivity, that is, the physical action of the viewer caused by the device of the work, is essential for its adventurous contemplation; on the other hand, when “kinetics” (peculiarity of moving works of art) appear inside public places, new behaviors are produced that favor communication between people.