Shot in super 8, on a wasteland under a gigantic bridge pillar, probably in New York, this sequence documents Gordon Matta-Clark constructing a wall with recycled objects, near a little boy making a fire. The start of the film shows an old man and a child who are rummaging in a heap of trash on this no-man's land. Shot like an amateur documentary, we understand that the filmmaker (probably Matta-Clark himself) is trying to discretely film the people on this wasteland, because a pretty girl who accompanies him occupies the left-hand side of the screen with a complicit air, while he focuses on the background. In this desolate landscape full of rubbish and stray dogs, Gordon Matta-Clark appears, armed with tools, and then we see him constructing the side of a wall, while everything is crumbling around him. To one side, a very young boy is making a fire with sticks. A police car passes and in the following shot the fire has gone out, probably at the request of the police. Matta-Clark ends his work by covering the construction with pages from comics, applied as wallpaper. The film is partly the document of a performance and partly a documentary on abandoned sites in the city; Matta-Clark pursues his in-situ interventions, constructing with chaos within chaos.

Patricia Maincent

Translated by Anna Knight