EXTRACT COMMUNAL
PARTS. 2009
- 60' (co-prod. Baiacedez Films)
After
being the caretakers of a block of council flats for 17
years,
Mrs. and Mr. Delval have finally retired.
Facing the camera, the residents leave messages
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EXTRACT
MR.
PERREIRA. 2013
- 54'
On
the occasion of Mr. Perreira's retirement,
messages are left by people who don't know him.
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On Communal
Parts and Mr. Perreira:
Communal
Parts and Mr. Perreira are
two videos made with the same mechanism
: people
leave a message to a caretaker who
is retiring.
Four years separate these two works.
Communal Parts was shot in
2009, in a Parisian suburb where Mr.
Delval
finally retired
after being there for seventeen years.
Messages are left by the tenants of the
block of council flats,
the friends and
the colleagues.
Mr. Perreira’s shooting took almost
two years. Messages are left by people
who don’t know Perreira. In reality,
Perreira doesn’t exist.
Only a few
of the speakers
were aware of it, but
most of them didn’t know they were talking
to a fictitious character.
At first sight, the diptych Communal
Parts / Mr. Perreira is
based on the duality right / wrong. Delval
really
existed, while
Perreira is fictitious.
But messages left to Perreira are not “wrong” because
people were never asked to “pretend”.
The context is real: people speak to someone
they don’t know, so they really speak
to him.
Obviously, the particularity of
the situation encouraged some of them
to move into fiction, sometimes unconsciously.
The real being destabilizing (what to
say
to someone we don’t know?)
it was
tempting to run away from it. Real and
imaginary overlap. The concept is the same
for both of the two videos, as artificial.
I am interested in how the artifice unveils
a part of the real:
the language, the attitudes,
the habitat, and obviously the gaze.
To whom are they talking?
Are they talking
to the one they are talking to (the caretaker)
or to those who will see the message
(the
audience)?
The
images of Communal
Parts made a unity.
People talked to the same caretaker, real
and identifiable: Delval. Their attentions
converge.
Perreira being fictitious, Mr. Perreira is
based on dispersion. Each speaker involves
his own reality (his interlocutor). So,
each vignette has its own center.
The caretaker, invisible, is obviously
not the subject of these works. He is the
pretext to show those who talk to him (the
speakers).
I see these “mirrors” as
reverse portraits (talking about yourself
in talking
to the other).
The tension focuses on those who are
on the screen, unveiling the links, real
or
supposed, between them.
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