The silence of the street

Work : The silence of the street.

Location : Athens, Greece. October 2012.

Exhibition at Artothèque de Caen with Didier Ben Loulou from 11/04/2014 to 31/05/2014 :

Statement :

Montpellier, November 9, 2012, (anniversary of the birth of Raymond Hains),
I’m coming back from Greece.
During my stay there, I sometimes felt like I was riding the crest of a tsunami heading straight for France. Today, behind my back, the echoes of this Athenian crowd heated with Molotov cocktails still blow, like a burning wind which continues to carry me.
On site, I walked a lot, questioned, observed. I also took a lot of photos.
Some, to complete a project conceived before leaving – like a good student who always finishes his homework – are very comfortable in the cool of a small improvised studio.
But that’s not what traveling is, it’s having the humility to change perspective.
Paradoxically, the most telling things I have to “report” on the situation I found there are precisely what we could describe as “non-images”. Those of countless giant advertising billboards left empty for lack of advertisers, lack of customers. “The medium is the message”; today we can take that literally.
Behind the impeccable shape of these containers revealed by the absence of content, on these screens which are no longer able to hide the sad reality, I wanted to project a personal interpretation, the brutal return of a betrayed utopia: that of these sixty-eight disheveled men who have since become publicity sons. I anticipated the possible end of the consumer society, the end of an era, of an economic model.
I come away reinforced in this intuition that the crisis forces us to rethink ourselves. As Gilles Deleuze said: “the number one act of resistance is to have the courage to doubt”.
These empty panels which revealed their background were of course an invitation to look behind the images, to tease the little “image maker” that I am, seeking to “produce” well-polished artistic material, to document , to inventory a moment of change which is experienced above all by emptiness, by the great starving shock of nothing…

Additional photographs :

This series of panels is to attune with these pictures of the walls of the city center of Athens, improvised Agora of the 21st century.

Greece, September-October 2012.

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