Café de l'union
4-minute video on monitor


A person who remembers is a person who does routes, including in his memory, routes of thoughts, distance and circulation of the images.



Nasser, who we see in this video, measures the circumference of a waste ground left after the disappearance of his café and carries with him a poster where is registered his fallen brand : " Union Café ". He walks, not towards a purpose, but as an archaeologist would do to map a site in which he’s alone to know the secret. Or still, as to question a ritual enclosure in which he would try to revive the antique worship. The editing, including a sound description of the elements of the café, which recomposes word by word, and Nasser’s wandering through this ground now deserted, generates an echo between the voice and the body, between the topological and the mental route. Moreover, if there’s a specific place that evokes the accumulation of narratives or memories, it is the café. All the stories meet and are told in the bar which is in itself a place of speaking and testimony.

From the concrete action realized by redrawing the perimeter of the café, it is an ephemeral anti-monument that merges. Indeed, the memory does not inevitably build itself on the erection of a monument nor a mass in remembrance. It rather can be done from the architectural gaps and the dismissals of history charges. The human presence, as the language, reactivates a space from the emptiness which is left.



Text written by Morad Montazami, art historian and critic