Olivier De Sagazan Brings TRANSFIGURATION to Festival Phénomena 2025

Artistic director D. Kimm will offer Montreal audiences the performance TRANSFIGURATION by French visual artist Olivier de Sagazan. This performance was first shown in the small venue of Sala Rossa in 2016, where the festival had to turn away dozens of attendees. Since then, TRANSFIGURATION has been acclaimed in over 25 countries and performed more than 350 times. It was essential for the Phénomena director to give younger generations the opportunity to witness this iconic work, brought to life by a rigorous and inspiring artist. In fact, the presentation of La Messe de l'Âne by the same artist at Usine C in 2023 sparked great interest.

A painter, sculptor, and performer, Olivier de Sagazan offers a gripping, unsettling, and moving glimpse into an alternative self, entirely free of inhibition. Transitioning from man to animal and from animal to various hybrid creatures, the artist creates shifting masks, shaping the many facets of his identity to reveal the fundamental strangeness of living bodies. Through a process of over-modeling with clay, Olivier de Sagazan pierces, erases, and unravels the layers of his face in a frenzied quest for a new essence and a previously unseen form. At times priest, politician, or scientist, Sagazan embodies all the actors of society, who transform before our eyes and are thus—whether powerful or powerless—drawn into the same collective hallucination, taking part in a grand farce of which they are utterly unaware.

"In a gesture of despair, I immerse myself in clay with my own body, to bring the work to life. I sculpt strange masks on my head, shifting with my emotions, erasing my identity and becoming a living work of art, somewhere between puppet and puppeteer."  — Olivier de Sagazan

"With nothing more than white clay and black and red paint […] Sagazan conjures both form and formlessness. He interrogates the face—this mask—penetrates it, probes its eye sockets, and disfigures it. He unearths the beast within man and vice versa, playing the role of a scarred jester or revisiting David Lynch's Eraserhead." — Le Monde

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