My last post, also on an exhibition, ("Notation: Kalkl und Form in den Knsten"), was perhaps a bit lengthy, so I'm going to more concisely summarize Paul Virilio's recent curatorial efforts at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in "Terre Natale: Ailleurs commence ici." Or rather, I should let Virilio speak for himself, which is precisely what he did in a life-size video of himself strolling across a French cobblestone street as he discoursed upon the show's theoretical foundations culled from recent French theoretical tropes: nomadism, population displacement, catastrophes, the changing notion of the city, etc.. Three different versions of this are available on the Fondation Cartier's website, and Virilio fans should be curious to see these nuggets of his recent philosophical-curatorial efforts in partnership with the photographer, Raymond Depardon.

You can also see an overview of the exhibition on the website-- the only difference between the French and English version is that the French version includes one helpful overview that the English does not.

Virilio: Global Catastrophe

The exhibition itself is quite small, as is the Foundation itself. Virilio's curated contributions consisted of two pieces, video collaborations by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin. Diller Scofidio + Renfro is an architectural duo whose performance and installation work I've definitiely seen in theatres and museums, but I've never taken to their typical slickness of design. (Their website is beautifully seductive and absolutely worth a visit.) They designed both spaces for Virilio, the first of which consisted of a suspended grid of white Apple monitors. It featured waves of coordinated videos of migrants in the duress of transit. The second space was a large, panoramic video screen that was a dramatic-graphic representation of refugees' movement during the last seven years, especially in relation to war and climate change. Spectators had to sit on the ground in order to not block the screen.

Quick verdict-- (or is a "verdict" necessary?) I didn't find Virilio's part of the show particularly interesting. Diller and Scofidio's slick structures ultimately seemed like little more than seductive interfaces for the same old information, which would have been just as abstract, unintelligible, and horrifying listed in print. Moreover, shouldn't it also be hard to justify the expense of this cutting-edge appartus when its ostensible subject is the migrant or refugee, who has less than nothing? Were I more familiar with Virilio's writing, I might ponder whether this also applies to an overly idealistic attitude in thinking about the catastrophe and deriving a rhetorical passion from the force of its description...

Raymond Depardon: Vanishing Local Languages

Before going to the show, I read that Depardon was a Magnum photograph, and I shut off. In fact, I almost didn't see his work, which would have been an enormous mistake-- Depardon's two very large documentary video works were incredibly touching and artful. The first was a series of seven or eight interviews with the representatives of disappearing languages, which ranged from patois in Occitan to disappearing populations in Bolivia, Chile, Ethiopia. Each interview is short, but concentrated-- they've most likely been rehearsed by the speaker, who is endowed a sense of subjectivity rarely given to cultures that may very well be wholly at odds with our own notion of the individual. A little bit of these are available on the exhibition website, and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Depardon also retains the best that Magnum's tradition of documentary photograph has to offer, namely, juxtaposed with the personal monologues concerning the experience of slipping into cultural and linguistic oblivion ("Who will be here to name things when I am gone?") are the remote lands in which these people live, which are gallingly beautiful, a natural beauty that would be somehow inconceivable without the life being eroded within it...