2 x 10-minute video projections
The micro-fictions created here by Élise Leclercq Bérimont and the persons who take part in it, question the end of the industrial world through its intimate echoes. From these meetings, which invite to the unpredictability of the exchange, arise actions improvised by the persons in a place crossed by their presence.
Can we only imagine all the history hidden behind a simple gesture ? Christine sweeps in a factory now empty, where she has been repeating this action during numerous years. The same place where from she was "swept", according to her own terms. The factory, place of muffling and exhaustion, appears here at nude, penetrated by the light offered from its cracks. Other cracks show themselves, those of memory, while the place is shown as a stage in its future. Not a theater stage, far from there, but the stage of memory, where memory comes back to life through the gestures it embodies. Salah repopulates the space of his café with his movements, alone. He draws with his movements a physical route of the place redrawing the mental route of the ideas. The actions are at once literal and metaphorical, where from their performative dimension. Correctness of the gestures are sending us back to the scale of the experience which underlies them, and music tunes distilled by the jukebox accompany this feeling of recollection in the repetition. As a song in which the last tune would always miss, there is a meditation of the final act in these "gestures of experience".
If factories are closed down, it's the same for the gestures which lived in them, closed down from their economic weight and market value. Reinvested by their political weight and their aesthetic value, these gestures discourage the disappearance of things and the disappearance of the "lived".
The micro-fictions created here by Élise Leclercq Bérimont and the persons who take part in it, question the end of the industrial world through its intimate echoes. From these meetings, which invite to the unpredictability of the exchange, arise actions improvised by the persons in a place crossed by their presence.
Can we only imagine all the history hidden behind a simple gesture ? Christine sweeps in a factory now empty, where she has been repeating this action during numerous years. The same place where from she was "swept", according to her own terms. The factory, place of muffling and exhaustion, appears here at nude, penetrated by the light offered from its cracks. Other cracks show themselves, those of memory, while the place is shown as a stage in its future. Not a theater stage, far from there, but the stage of memory, where memory comes back to life through the gestures it embodies. Salah repopulates the space of his café with his movements, alone. He draws with his movements a physical route of the place redrawing the mental route of the ideas. The actions are at once literal and metaphorical, where from their performative dimension. Correctness of the gestures are sending us back to the scale of the experience which underlies them, and music tunes distilled by the jukebox accompany this feeling of recollection in the repetition. As a song in which the last tune would always miss, there is a meditation of the final act in these "gestures of experience".
If factories are closed down, it's the same for the gestures which lived in them, closed down from their economic weight and market value. Reinvested by their political weight and their aesthetic value, these gestures discourage the disappearance of things and the disappearance of the "lived".
Text written by Morad Montazami, art historian and critic