The work of artist and stage director Théo Mercier forms a critical inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, ethnography, geopolitics and tourism. Between choreographed performance works and the exploration of diverse materials, he is both a creator and a collector, involved in a rich dialogue between past, present and future, between artisanal and industrial, real and imaginary.
Most of Mercier's pieces turn on the anthropomorphisation of objects - whether they are found, assembled, in collage or grafted together. He tends to work in series, forming communities of pieces - roughly grouped as young or old, male or female. At the heart of these, he reveals and invents a mobile social hierarchy.
His work emphasizes the importance of movement. By producing and collecting such hybridity Théo Mercier gives shape to a very distinct exotism: transcultural, transgeographic and transtemporal.
This is underlined through the staging of a display which constantly seems to change from a cabinet of curiosities, to a plundered hoard, to a warehouse, to the artist's studio, to a group photograph ...
Théo Mercier is reviewing the history of mankind and its productions, which he compares to the review made possible by the Internet.
Just as he likes to explore plurality in the status of his objects and his displays, Théo Mercier constantly plays with the confusion, even the loss, of the artist's presence in the creation of a work, a game that also appears in his performance piece Radio Vinci Park (in collaboration with François Chaignaud).