At first glance, Bordeaux Piece seems to fulfil the minimum conditions of a video installation: a loop projection in a relatively dark space and a soundtrack broadcast through loudspeakers set on the floor and headphones. The image's format (16/9) recalls the Cinemascope format; the projection screen is wide (300 x 169 cm recommended); the image's content refers to modern cinema, as much through the décor and the aesthetics of the narrative, as through the story that is presented: a villa whose very readable architecture dominates an open, semi-urban landscape, three characters, two men and a woman, and a changing situation. One of the men comes into the picture (in the villa) at the start of the sequence, while the other leaves the premises at the end of the sequence (exchange, amorous drama, jealousy). Shot follows shot, edited on the basis of the conversations (which you cannot hear in the exhibition room), and the movements and viewpoints of the characters, the place's topography, and the configuration of the spaces. A love story in a setting of great modern beauty (and coldness). The reference to film is very obvious – one thinks right away of Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt), as well as the films of Hitchcock and Antonioni. Bordeaux Piece seems to be part of a post-cinema approach where the task of the signifier (the figures and motifs) is given priority to the detriment of plot and narrative. On closer inspection things become more complicated and the “first impression” is foiled. A second soundtrack is offered to visitors' ears by way of individual headphones; this track plays the dialogues uttered by the characters seen on screen. It proposes another sound space – more private, isolated, secret and attached to the image and its space –, differing from the first one, and broadcasting ambient sounds of nature (birdsong, rustling leaves), spilling out beyond the frame of the image, opening onto the diegetic off-screen space and the real space of the exhibition room. A narrative, historical time-frame is thus overlaid on a time with no chronology, a time that is a perpetual present, independent of the image, and independent of the drama. The real space is thus endowed with specific time-related qualities, thanks to the sound. During this time, one sequence follows another; they are similar, yet not identical, resembling each other while not being the same. And for good reason: David Claerbout's video lasts for 13 hours and 43 minutes. It consists of 69 edited sequences lasting 12 minutes each, shot in a villa built by Rem Koolhaas near Bordeaux. The 69 shots were taken at different times of day over several weeks, in such a way that the final cut situates the first sequence at sunrise and the last at nightfall, thus giving the impression that the actors have replayed their parts throughout one and the same day, and that the story has shifted by coiling around itself. Each scene is naturally lit by sunlight, in differing ways: the theatrical effect of the light means that the morning's drama is not the evening's drama. The time-frame of the narrative is interfered with, contradicted and coloured by cosmic time: the sun follows its course and exchanges time for a space of visibility. David Claerbout has always asked spectators to experiment with visibility within a time period; in pieces like The Stack, 2002, and Reflecting Sunset, 2003, it is in particular the movement of the sun, or the movement of the earth, that dazzles or else makes the visible explode. Between difference and repetition are thus configured layers and qualities of time which gradually construct in the spectators' minds a space of visibility and representation. The effect of depletion, bound up with repetition, empties the fi lm of all psychological content and all dramatic suspense, and renders spectators available for the slightest event that veers away from the reference model: the changing light which transforms bodies and spaces, producing shadows and reflections, etc.; the voices fading and altering with tiredness and weariness; their own attention which alters and their own perception which becomes dulled. Whatever the time of day when spectators enter the installation, the video is at any old moment of its play. Any moment is the same as another, because it is no longer a question of fiction. The space and time of the medium and the representation are gradually absorbed by real space and time. The time that spectators allot to the work, a part of the 13 hours and 43 minutes that Bordeaux Piece lasts, only a part of the whole, is enough to represent an experience and permit a structuring and conception of time within the perceptive activity. An opportunity for reconciliation between man and the cosmos?

Françoise Parfait

Translated by Simon Pleasance