FR

in front off
installation / 2006




Placed at the exhibiting space’s entrance, a TV monitor shows in a long steady shot the empty stage of a press conference at the White House. This representation of power follows the rules of a timeless media format. It is staged under specific lighting and framing conventions with the involvement of official symbols (flag, podium, seal of the president, etc.). This decorum, created solely to become an image through the camera frames, is an imprint in the collective consciousness aided by the numerous cinema fictions that re-use it. When the President of the United States or the Press Secretary addresses the press, everything seems under control, everything fits in the official frame, thanks to this reassuring and familiar decorum.
A wall with a curtain extension divides the exhibiting space in two parts, directing the viewer through an opening. Pushing aside the curtain, he finds himself inside the stage-like setting he has just seen a televised-image of on the monitor. He then finds out that the decorum is poorly made: pieces of fabric hanging up, a wood construction approximately painted, and enlarged prints of Internet pictures. Only what appears in the field of the camera―set to face the viewer and permanently film―has been elaborated. By somehow arriving from the back of the image, he experiences at once its fragility (limited frame, lighting and focal distance) and its power of realism.
The symbolic power of this highly formatted decorum relies on the control of the flatness and length of its resulting image. The installation based on this media-formatted setting gathers, in a separate time and space, the simulacrum and its immediate realistic effect. It gives the viewer a chance to experience the limits of the camera frame and its depth of field, and allows him to move from the flatness of the TV-image to the depth of its construction.



Fabric, flag, wood, prints, lights, microphone, video camera brodcasted on monitor

Master's Degree Exhibition - 2006
ESBAMA, Montpellier, France

Click on the pic to see views of the installation