Metro-Boulot-Dodo: FIB: NOW Festival 2003

The universal is a big canvas to fill, and there is nothing more universal than the role of lies, large or small, little and white, or otherwise, in everyday life. MBD’s hybrid performance-installation, FIB, commissioned by the NOW festival team and Leicester’s Phoenix Arts for the 2003 NOW festival, succeeds in filling the canvas and leaving the visitor with a wry and personalised view of this huge subject.

FIB is based around a "life experiment" established by Metro-Boulot-Dodo to explore deception in their lives, with strict rules to follow, including the need to keep the experiment itself secret. With its ordered lines of truth-booths and its filmic sound and light effects, FIB is highly structured with a sense of order and timing that would impress a sergeant-major, an interesting contrast with the disorder and disarray of the themes it explores. The FIB game toys with many aspects of lying, self-deception and truth, though perhaps the subtler form of deception, lying by omission was a little neglected as a subject for exploration. However, the game itself brought this directly to the viewer/visitor in a way that was not entirely comfortable. The first booth that I chose to enter contained simply a chair and a small camera. A disembodied voice asked me to respond to the question "Why do you lie?" and waited for a response. Uncertain as to how much or how little I was expected to say to even if I was supposed to speak, I did say something. It was only three booths later when I sat down in front of a TV set and saw one of the visiting group sit in front of a camera and hear the question "Why do you lie?" that I realised the trick…MBD’s failure to tell us that our personal responses would end up being viewed by another person in the group was an enactment of the discomfort of discovered deception. This trickery bothered me a bit although it was very much in the spirit of the performance.

The experience fitted with the controlling nature of FIB. Its entire structure institutionalised us as small cogs in one large machine, responding obediently to time signals – when to enter the boxes, when to leave, when to move around. We had to accept a set order and also had to adapt to intimate situations within a very short space of time. In one booth a member of MBD stood in a perspex box, muttering a monologue of guilt and self doubt about the part that lies played in his life. To hear him, the visitor wore headphones, which created both a sense of distance and an uncomfortable intimacy with the speaker. In another booth, I was invited to sit in a tiny recreation of a restaurant and listen to the story of a woman telling a story of a painful time in her life and how it lead to a major lie to her boyfriend. I felt caught between the roles of agony aunt and unwilling confidante. Whilst my role was real – I was being told the story – I had no real part in it and could not respond or react to the story being told. This created a kind of space within the experience, a sense of distance.

FIB had the effect of making me want to react by compelling me to relate to the stories and think about the kinds of lies we tell and why. Whilst in some spaces I could only listen and not share, others allowed the visitor to intimate their experiences, albeit alone. On first sight I was disturbed by the sight of graffiti spattered loo and wondered what was coming next. The booth, with marker pens lying on the floor was an opportunity to share a secret with the safety of anonymity. Some people couldn’t bring themselves to share even in this space, though they shared this fear by writing of it on the walls.

The clear structure with its clockwork timing and ordered numbering system behind FIB gives the viewer a kind of freedom. The mechanics of the experience give the visitor more liberty to be in their own heads and in the experiences of MBD. The brevity of each section of time in each booth creates a clarity and immediacy and a sense of excitement, bringing the visitor’s focus to here and now. The limits on time demanded that we throw ourselves into the experience fully, before it passed. The short time slots were both exciting and frustrating, especially in booths like the one containing the PC with video and dictaphone diaries of the MBD group and their project. I would have liked to find out more about the project as a whole, and would happily have spent more time in there. From all the booths with their varied contents, FIB’s most powerful emotion, amongst the many suggested, was of humour. My strongest response was of laughter whilst I was there. FIB’s openness in exploring the role of lying in all its forms gave it a deep sense of the (admittedly dark or even tragi) comedy of everyday life and an open mindedness, so it never got stuck in preaching or pontificating.

Even in expressing the pain caused by lying and our need to deceive, there is a strong sense of irony, an enjoyment of the pure daftness of how people get by and what we need to do in order to survive. The ending of the cheated woman’s screaming swearing diatribe in one booth was meant to be both poignant and ironic. I really enjoyed the "phone booth" in which the visitor picks up the phone to the rantings of a telephone salesman driven crazy by his own half-baked lies. I got a strong sense that despite friends offended and jobs lost in their "lying game", MBD had a hell of a good time developing FIB and it shows. And that’s no lie.

You Are Here - Camilla Zajac