«Les combinatoires» 2000 -Galerie Edouard Manet - Gennevilliers
« multimédia » Installation
A 4 x 15 meter white canvas screen unfolds from the back wall of the gallery to the entrance, covering five chairs placed on the floor facing the screen. A 15-minute video, playing continuously (on a loop), is projected onto the back screen (4 x 2.50 m). This video shows five "model-technician characters" dressed in colored overalls: a. white model (painter's overalls), b. gray model (electronic equipment maintenance overalls), c. blue model (electrical equipment installation overalls), d. red model (materials transport overalls), e. yellow model (equipment and machine installation overalls). • These five characters move within the image, carrying and setting up the equipment necessary for preparing and implementing an image: a spotlight, stools, reflector umbrellas, panels, etc. They are setting up the technical equipment, the backstage of the image to come and in the making: technicians behind the scenes, stage managers of the margins. A video image is projected onto their suits, capturing fragments of a film yet to be made and produced (a kind of location scouting: views of forests, gardens, trains, etc.). While absorbing the image, they are building it; their movements within the scene blur the interpretation of the projection. The scene they are setting up remains almost illegible. The final image will not exist, unfinished and perpetually evolving; it will remain a projection of a performance yet to come... • Five chairs are placed facing the screen, but not in a straight line. Each chair is equipped with a motion detector. When a spectator takes a seat, the detector triggers a sound. If all five chairs are occupied, all five sounds are triggered simultaneously, creating a cacophony. As soon as the spectator leaves their chair, the sound stops. Only the video projection continuously illuminates the installation. Each voice (monologue) refers to a potential character in the image. Voices from the margins, voice-overs, outside the image, the voices of prompters or stand-ins. The texts evoke, without commenting on or illustrating, the action unfolding and visible on screen. Voices from a space between two worlds (backstage, margins, parentheses): a kind of monologue and inner thoughts. The text is in flux, like the film's script: only the machinery is visible.