Time is at the centre of modern society’s worries: every object is studied and manufactured according to the impact its very existence will have on its future use. From washing powder to the remote control, from the car to the computer keyboard, from the milk bottle to the cheese box, everything around us must become part of this contemporary logic of saving time and performance. Nothing is left to fate: control, predict, manipulate and destroy.
But time remains a phenomenon in itself, inseparable from the personal perception and the personality of each human being. Modern technologies succeed in manipulating Time, but only on the surface, at the level of subjective or collective perception. Time itself is untouched by this superficial and useless human action. Time is unstoppable. Time cannot be understood as a whole. Time doesn’t care about all the efforts of modern society to change its cycle.
The Video Speech triptych plays with the subjective perception of Time, emphasising, visually and musically, how acceleration and deceleration, through repetition, can influence our idea of time, changing our point of view without interfering with the overall course of Time itself.
Video Speech was conceived as a complete performance: three projectors in three different rooms, the videos repeated in a continuous loop. The audience is completely immersed in this different vision.
video speech 01.01 A fixed image that multiplies to infinity. A lone sound sends us back to the introspective dimension of the visual sphere. The Nietzschean “return of the same”, the game of repetition. A taste of death. Nothing can distract the audience’s attention from the magnetic pull of this unusual mix of image and sound.
video speech 01.02 The Ferris wheel has always been the symbol of games. This part shows acceleration and deceleration as a game played by Time itself. TIME PLAYS GAMES. Another way of seeing. A Fellini-like atmosphere, ironic and deep.
video speech 01.03 A fixed image that seems not to move, and then the madness. A modern and at the same time timeless image. In humanity’s absurd game with Time, the background plays a fundamental role. Stillness against hysteria, static against moving, control against loss of control. Emphasising the monotony of the image, the music underlines the tension.
May 1968 / May 2008: forty years of the history of France, and of the whole world. Forty years have passed since one of those major events whose meaning grows year after year. Forty years of waiting, disillusion and remorse; of memories, assessments and thoughts, as well as victories.
The aim of this live show: to analyse the events that took place in France in May 1968 and to show, through the demonstrative and demagogic power of sound and video, what really happened in Paris. To work on memories, often forgotten, and bring the audience to a different way of thinking: an analysis of France’s central role in the international community in the field of the power of the masses.
Through this conceptual installation, which will be developed with the latest digital technologies for sound and video manipulation, with a touch of interactivity, and then in smaller versions adapted to several media, the goal will be to show the audience this cultural experience that is May 68 and to teach it.
MAY AGAIN // happen again doesn’t want to be educational.
a) I want to show the ability of the French nation to impose itself on the political authorities and the government, and to change its destiny. This comes from a very important cultural background.
b) Using powerful images of the students’ clashes in 68, I would like to bring into focus the role of the masses against the use and abuse of aggressive forms of power by the government.
Through the re-editing of archive images, layered on several levels of understanding, I want to show and relive the emotions that those student revolts caused at the time.
A hopeful metaphysics could be the subtitle of the show. How many countries live under an authoritarian dictator? How many countries, nations and peoples don’t have the right and the power to affirm their ideas?
Heir to the French Revolution, France has this power and proves to the world that it can use it.
Music and video will grow in sync on a semicircular screen, with two projectors showing the same and different images. The audience, surrounded by the scene, will be the main actor of the show.
There will also be an installation, as part of the show and the performance: a sketched guillotine in transparent Plexiglas, to the right of the screen, with a spotlight that will bring it into focus at the end of the show: the symbol of the final repression, or of the accident that may happen if violence is used.
Three smaller 16:9 screens will be mounted to the right, centre and left of the semicircular screen. These TVs will show a stroboscopic edit of famous politicians’ portraits and famous phrases. The audience will be bombarded with images, and in this way the impact of the show will be more real.
A sound engineer and a video engineer will manipulate the music and the images.
Finally, 1,968 street paving stones broken into pieces, and 40 intact, will be placed in the middle of the room: the same stones used to pave the streets of Paris, which became such a symbol of the May 68 revolts. They will be arranged very neatly, in a pyramid. A small projector will project a capture of the room onto them. The stone, rich in symbolism, will open onto another level of meaning: it will unveil the face, the audience, the masses.
In this way, the installation MAY AGAIN // happen again can run by itself: the performance can be programmed several times a day, and the installation can play a recorded performance in a loop.
First part: day The video will be very objective. We will follow the students during the day, calmly making their demands. The tension is underneath, and can be felt in a continuous crescendo. We use the gentlest archive images, the ones with the least emotional impact. The music will be rousing but calm, almost dreamy.
Second part: night The video will focus on the building of the barricades and the blossoming of the revolt in the Latin Quarter. We will use some never-seen-before images. Trees fall and cars are overturned. Human chains start to grow. This part gives the show its structure. Dark and steady. None of the other screens will show pictures. The music, minimal and dark, will underline this tension, which ends in a fight. The arrival of the police cars will announce the start of the fighting.
Third part: night The video will focus on the clashes between the police and the students. The TV screens will broadcast the random collage of pictures in a very repetitive way. The images are very violent, at a very fast tempo that needs to shock and stir emotion, in quite a hardcore style. The end of the show, developing in a crescendo of emotions, needs to lead the audience to a deep reflection. The strobe lights will start in this final phase of the show, to underline the tension. Once the video has finished, only the faces of the audience will be shown on the stones.
Software: Ableton Live and Resolume; Sony Vegas for the final edit of the show.
May 1968 represents a very important period for those like me who are in their thirties today and whose parents lived through the events. Examples and stories were part of family discussions. The key role of the French students’ revolt.
For me, May 1968 represents the first time young people had the right to express themselves and to have their voices heard by others. The end of the supremacy of the family and of the monarchic power of institutions and, last but not least, the coming of age of women’s power: a real discovery of identity.
It is true that the real 68 generation is now full of contradictions. We are the children of May 68, and we grew up with fewer barricades, boundaries and stereotypes. Fewer fixed ideas, fewer values, but more products and fewer ideas. We have built a more open society that keeps breaking taboos.
Kids today are a thousand times freer than in the early 70s. That’s why MAY AGAIN // happen again borrows the language of the young and tries to revive the memory of those events, which were so important in the history of the modern world. I hope I will be able to reach a sensitive and responsive audience. And I would love to be able to explain, with images and music, the role those events play in the modern world.
MAY AGAIN // happen again wants to underline that we must not forget the past: for this, collective memory needs to be shown, so as to avoid the mistakes of the past.