This Friday, Cristo Riffo will present The Self Writing Manifesto at Mois Multi in collaboration with the Avatar Centre’s 30th anniversary. It will be part of this year’s Audio Cabaret at Hall de Méduse — 591 rue De Saint-Vallier Est, Québec — starting at 5pm.
If you’re in Québec this weekend, check it out!

The Self Writing Manifesto is an ongoing cosmic drama of “information” being complexified and simplified in cycles of creation and extinction. Using live visuals and generative audio, audiences will embark on an immersive journey into the microcosmos as witness to this. Playing with different scales in size and time, we will be shining light and giving voice to the invisible that occurs right before our eyes, connecting us to the ancestral past of microorganisms, immersing visitors into the realm of the microscopic as a way to look inside and out of the complexity of our times, in all its intricacy and chaos.
As we sit on the brink of radical changes in our political, social and environmental sphere, we are witnessing the advent of post-capitalist collapse, neo-fascism, and the undeniable effects of climate change, repositioning ourselves in a form of action — and at the same time, of active listening. Reality is more than human perception and interpretations. Planet Earth is a thick reality composed by trillions of tons of biomass produced and composted over and over again: trillions of births and deaths, of mutations and shifts, information being passed over and over again for millions of years, forming so many complex relationships between beings that it’s impossible to calculate their interdependencies.
In an A\V performance, using samples collected by the artist in water sources from Quebec along with time-lapse recordings of cultural activity, audiences will be invited on a sensitive journey, using organic textures from live feed microscopy, mixed with video documentation of cities being built, human agglomerations, and transit. Tracing the recorded growth of our evolutionary ancestor, Mycelium, and electronically produced sonic translations of growing matter will expand our perception of nature and what is considered reality.

For more information, please visit the Facebook event and the Audio Cabaret page on Avatar Quebec’s site.
Photos by Sarah Barone.