DSC_0113 Séquence 43b FLG-2
HDV, 6 minutes

with the participation of Geoffrey Daux


A character comes forward, clothed in an outfit that looks as much like that of a bacteriologist on a scientific mission as that of an astronaut fallen on an abandoned planet.  Because if the planet in question is none other than the Earth, the precautionary and methodical gestures that he performs move us away from it, as if we were in a zone of high radioactivity.  An irresistible atmosphere of science fiction floats about, or at least, a reconsideration of earthly gravity (one could just as well imagine the person underwater, exploring the skeleton of a sunken ship).  One thinks of the spectacular scenario of “the last man on Earth,” that the movies have often revisited, but replayed here with a certain distance like the metaphor of the last witness, that of a culture of a society that History has not remembered in its official pages.  The fissures and asymmetrical angles of the fallen building thus seem to represent the meanderings of a memory that our diver surveys in order to best fill them in.

The noises of machines and factories that resound in the background offer the possible soundtrack of a knowledge that would have been lost along the way on the road of industrial progress.  But just like in the case of gravity, the relationship to time has also become uncertain, or rather, opens itself to other possibilities.  Walking thus on the ruins of a bygone time, where the character searches for botanical specimens which testify to traces of life, his mere presence transforms the architecture in a scene into an archeology of the future.


Text written by Morad Montazami, art historian and critic