"Off“
From: 09/12 – 25/01/2000



There is no film linked to the narration. A desert located in front of a mountain scape that radiates light into the darkness. Two headlights illuminating a dirt road. DANCING, an empty promise in a timeless night time. Nobody is there. The tale is obliterated, the space of narration has vanished in a presence that is only NOW. The actors are gone. What is told is a different story: of the white spots on the narrative's map, of these moments in which the stories have ended, have lost track of themselves. There is no beginnings nor endings that could console the spectator. The end of the movie thus starts an different story, a promise not kept, the conflict unresolved, the landscape bearing only traces of a civilisation that has disappeared. The couple, lovers but not necessarily, has been passing through these regions like phantoms in order to vanish within it. Or maybe it is even the other way round: the landscape has disappeared inside of the actors, the couple. Thus outside turns into inside. Those fictitious exterior and interior spaces refer to templates of filmic and narrative origin. Artificial nature is shown, as it is also defined in the sphere of the movies, and nature's artificiality as well. The mis-en-scene displays a contradictory construction of spaces and fields that are always out of focus, or have disappeared altogether, stripped of the functions they once have maintained within a narrative of transformations.

OFF, hors-champs. Places, moments and desasters which we will never register since they take place and appear only outside of the frame. Never can we go there, though it defines the frame of the tale. Where do the actors go after they have left the space of the image? The end of a film is the beginning of a never ending desire, and at the same time the beginning of another ending (of the couple's relation, for instance). Godard asks: Qu'est-ce que c'est, une catastrophe? La prémiere strophe d'un poème d'amour. The work is about catastrophes like that as well. Shelter, cabins and hide outs sheltering nothing. DANCING in an empty hangar, as empty as the promises of a civilisation that locates its very origin within the center of a history of repression, a mental OFF, as it were. The panoramic view is an invention allowing for the gaze to occupy landscape by transferring it from a spatial to a temporal mode of perception. The panoramic view thus creates a accidental meeting of spaces emerging from various films and templates, a spatial, temporal and narrative accident.

Some pine trees defining the line of an artificial horizon while in a beach house somewhere a character opens a suitcase, thus maybe bringing the world to an end, as we know it. The actual subject of this work is the history unwritten of spaces and their relation to actors, beginning with the waning away of the couple amidst a scenery that is a space conjuring up its own emptiness. The films that have been references for these sceneries are BADLANDS of Terence Malick, JE T'AIME MOI NON PLUS of Serge Gainsbourgh, TEOREMA of Pier Paolo Pasolini, KISS ME DEADLY of Robert Aldrich.