Exhibition review published in ArtReview (London), no. 30, March 2009, p. 141.
Terre Natale, Ailleurs Commence Ici (Native Land, Elsewhere Begins Here) is a confrontation between filmmaker and photographer, Raymond Depardon (born 1942), and urbanist and philosopher, Paul Virilio (born 1932). While the first is strongly attached to the country and one’s roots, the other announces an unprecedented urban exodus that is going to reshape our cities and challenge the notion of one’s idendity, subjects becoming pure trajectories. The dialogue between Depardon’s films and Virilio’s curated video installations at Fondation Cartier suggests the fundamental need of redefining our understanding of ‘native land’ in a world where, according to the urbanist, “the sedentary type is someone who’s at home everywhere, with his mobile and his laptop, be it in a lift, in a plane or on a high-speed train, whereas a nomad is a person who’s not at home anywhere.” By 2040, he argues, nearly one billion people will be displaced for economic or ecological reasons, “it’s like China going on a trip.”
In the first part of the exhibition are projected two films by Depardon (all work 2008). In Hear Them Speak, the filmmaker gives a voice to threatened minorities like the Yanomami in Brazil, the Mapuche in Chile, the Afar in Ethiopia, or the Occitans in France. In this short series of medium shot interviews, Depardon remains silent to let each ethnic representative speak in his or her mother tongue. Always named, addressing the camera directly, they tell the story of how they lost or risk loosing their native land, their ‘forest-land’ in Yanomami words, due to globalization. Displaying their despair to preserve what remains of it and above all to preserve their language, i.e. their identity, the film is a soft punch: “You white people have to listen to us now, we are all going to die when the forest-land burns” (Davi Kopenava, Yanomami, Amazonia). The silent filmed journal Around the World in 14 Days doesn’t compare with the strength of the previous film, but Depardon’s speed traveling from Washington DC to Cape Town through Tokyo or Singapore makes a transition to the second part of the exhibition, as it displays an experience of what Virilio calls the ‘world’s shrinking distances’.
Virilio’s concepts are given form in two untitled video installations by artists and architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin. The first is a choreography of news footage and photographs on forced migration, massive exodus or fast transportation, the images displayed on 48 monitors that are suspended from the ceiling. The effect lacks the strength of Virilio’s discourse. The images, some of them violent (riots), lose their political dimension, their roughness, in a too aesthetic and high-tech orchestration that could be an add for Apple’s new flat screens. The second is absolutely fascinating. A computer generated world map is animated in a circular and immersive projection to visualize the economic, ecological or political causes and data of global migrations.
Finally, should I ask you where you’re from or where you’re going to?