SOUS LES PLANTES LES PLAGES, 2017
Description
A laboratory like shelf is at the centre of the installation, on which 32 light bulbs of different kinds are disposed. They are blinking in Morse code texts connected to different kinds of utopias that have been either forgotten or put aside. The shelf seems to have been there for a long time, abandoned, and nature has taken it over. But this island of nature, does it not make an allusion to the Island of Utopia of Thomas More, with its shape? And the Morse code, one of the rare existing universal codes, to a lighthouse? During the exhibition different texts followed each other on the bulbs. We could read them in a booklet that is part of the work or through an application for smartphones that reads Morse code. During the same time the nature upon which the installation lies changed as well. And even if this Island of Utopia was watered twice a week by a gardener, what did it become? Did Utopia flourish or did it die before our very eyes?
At the opposite of the Island there is another piece of earth that gives home to a monitor and another booklet. On the monitor a video collage composed of commercial and propaganda clips from the 50ties, mainly from the United States. What has been, at the time, presented as truth, today is easily read as a straightforward lie. Have these messages made the way for, what we call today, the society of ‘Post-Truth’ in which we live today? Incorporated into them are extracts of John Carpenter’s “They Live” (1988). The booklets on site are taken from the film. Maybe we are already in a futurist society, maybe not. But we are most definitely in a dystopian one.
A decomposed sound is lingering in the air, “Songs of Love and Squalor”, carrying the reminiscences of songs that we once new: ‘Le temps des cerises’ – linked to the Parisian commune, ‘The International’ and ‘Bella Ciao’. But will these couple of notes be sufficient to awaken our conscious mind or will they function on a more subconscious level, like a perfume or a long lost memory that escapes us at the very moment when we thought to have cached it again?
Just a commercial
SOUS LES PLANTES LES PLAGES – Performance