The form of the work
On a Web platform, an interactive map of public transport in the Paris
district forms a constellation, an imaginary landscape where each point
gives access to a capsule of images, of sounds, of words.
These fragmented sensations unveil a poetry of urban movement.
Scenography
An interactive map and projection of a sound triptych.
Itinérances métropolitaines
Vague and forgotten landscapes
Trains and camera pictures are closely related. In a train, the window
frames a landscape that, although random, is predictable, and although
fixed, is moving. Conversations and sounds inside the carriage mix with
the roaring and knocking wheels in a short and repetitive sound track
for a film, vanishing and reappearing, always different yet similar.
Something is happening, when nothing is happening. The destinations of
all trains define a dramatic genre, which is the genre of deception.
Among trains, the commuter train figures the film noir. The landscape is
often absent, hidden, or shown as a metaphor of the blackness of souls
and poverty. It is an abandoned landscape, come down in the world, an
extension of the wild and forlorn strips of land that border the tracks,
prolong the platforms and the stations.
Marie Combes’ work here gives back an image to these picture-less
landscapes. The shots reconstitute an interrupted movement. The polyptic
pictures reanimate a voyage from movements without perceptible
qualities.
As in these commuter trains, the landscape is intermittent, masked by
tunnels or walls, the fictions proposed are brief forms. The landscape
flashes by, sudden and bedraggled, underlined by the sour comment of the
train, screaming through the grey air.
Voyages with no departure and no arrival gave these images and sounds,
which clothe in a new dignity lands that were disrupted, lands without
grace but not without a soul.
Pierre Oudart - February 24 - 2012
EXHIBITION
Un-Privileged Views
Saturday, March 3, 6:00 p.m., March 3-25
Un-privileged views turns a lens on anti-iconic images in the urban landscapes.
Un-Privileged Views collects “anti-iconic views,” both in terms of
visual experience and political reality, of a broad selection of cities
and promotes unfamiliar views of familiar places in order to change how
we think about and represent them. Public images of cities tend to be
defined by the iconic photographs with which their buildings,
neighborhoods, skylines and vistas are represented, even though the
views portrayed in these stereotypical images are frequently at odds
with the life of the city and the reality of what occurs in them.
WUHO
6518 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Located between Wilcox Ave. and Schrader Blvd.
Hollywood & Highland nearest metro stop
Itinérances métropolitaines
