OLIVIER BARDIN - THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

In this installation, particularly developed for Multipistes, Olivier Bardin confronts two text readings. In the first part of the installation environment Sur La Constitution à donner à la France (1793), the standard work by Robespierre, resounds. A political text, read out in French by Sylvie Caspar, the voice of the television network ARTE. The clear, televisual declamation intertwines with echoes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1848). In semi-darkness the silhouettes of spectators on the other side of a projection screen slowly become apparent. The projection shows a man who reads out a fragment from Carroll’s famous children’s novel, with a young girl by his side. The girls does not look at him, she undergoes the text in silence. The story of Alice who ends up in an estranging world past a mirror might well have been her own dream. The man tries to reach her past the dream. A relationship becomes apparent out of their body language – maybe they are father and daughter. His voice vibrates a familiar musicality, but none of the words have any meaning to her. Her face shows an affinity, but still she doesn’t understand the language, the dream is lost on her. What remains, past the language, the origin, the generation gap, is the image of two bodies, two faces, a voice, a genuine kinship. Like the girl, we do not make out the story from what we are listening to, but from what we think we hear and reflect. The video image is almost completely illuminated by the daylight shining on the characters from behind, as if the image will slowly fade out, until nothing but the voice of the actor resounds in space and intertwines with echoes from Robespierre’s political discourse.

video | col.
spoken | french
installation

Olivier Bardin The horizontality, the conflict between points-of-view, in image and language, is one of the main characteristics of the work of Olivier Bardin (°1969). In his videos he goes on the lookout for ways to channel and organise this diversity, in order to seize the conditions of their representation and reception, and the construction of individual autonomy. Followed by the all-seeing eye of the camera the setting always works as an environment in which our own social identity is projected in slow motion.

This event is part of Multipistes