LISTING, DETAIL

2009

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Video installation presenting text excerpts from Listing.

4 monitors, 4 distinct loops, about 75’ each

(French version 2009, English version 2011)

The installation Listing only allows the reading of the printed text by the few fragments that appear on the surface of the heap of paper. From a conceptual point of view, this does make sense, since it symbolically corresponds to the reality, which is that nobody can access the global knowledge of all the produced works of art. However, as the time I spent writing this inventory - still in progress - represents several years of work, I was frustrated that the audience couldnʼt access to a more developed content. That's why I conceived another form offering the public the possibility to simultaneously read four excerpts on video screens, just as if cameras were focused on the listing to transmit details as through a magnifying glass.

Each screen presents a different sample and operates independently from the others, so that the cohabitation of different passages is left to chance. The fact that the screens were aligned also made me choose specific video transitions, so that the installation evokess a slot machine that would be dragged into a perpetual uncontrollable motion.

In The Photobook : A History, Martin Paar and Gerry Badger cite a publication of Alexander Honory which they qualify as "the ultimate photobook": itʼs a book without image in which each page describes in a few words a lost photograph... This reinforces my idea that Listing is also a work of profound photographic nature.