marianne mispelaëre

WE SAW THAT THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT TO SEE

installation
steel structures
videos in color without sound
durations: 06’07’’, 06’27’’, 06’19’’
variable dimensions
2018
prod. Palais de Tokyo

"We saw that there was nothing left to see" is a quote from a journalist invited in 2001 by the Taliban to bear witness to the destruction of two monumental Buddhas carved fifteen centuries earlier into the cliffs of the Bamiyan valley in Afghanistan. It is such phenomena of absence in public space that is studied in this video installation, an attempt to detect the negative presence that is left behind in the void.
Politics of architectural or patrimonial deconstructions being acted out on different places in the word these last years are observed here: the Schlossplatz in Berlin (Germany), which has been razed and rebuilt several times between 1950 and the present day, the statue of a confederate colonel in Baltimore (USA) that was removed from its pedestal in 2017, and the Sidi Moussa church (Algeria), demolished in 2017. Representative of political, social or religious ideologies, these structures are removed. Then, the nowvacant sites are full of symbols, traces, references, images, texts, legends, myths and affects. We have nothing left to see but we can read the void.
The three videos bring together images of the now-vacant sites with plural and subjective accounts of their histories. The latter are expressed in sign language, an embodied and fragmented form of communication, here occasionally subtitled, that translates our inability to grasp the totality of these disappearances.

MARIANNE MISPELAËRE