Tarnac. Le chaos et la grâce
Video installation
© Joachim Olender et Le Fresnoy – Studio national. Foto Olivier Anselot (01 + 06_vues de l’exposition Panorama 14, Le Fresnoy)
Th e Tarnac af air is not the worst police plot of an anti-terrorist state. But it is the strangest in the great disproportion between the political and media outburst and the lack of proof against the «terrorists». To those who thought that the society of spectacle had dissolved politics in the sensational, the invention of terrorism showed that politics has gone beyond its aestheticization. It returns to reality in the form of banal events disguised as crimes of the State. These «non-events» punctuate a crazy story, between invisible terror exerted by those in power and fanciful abhorrent acts committed by a lawless tribe.
Between the imaginary and the reality, emotions float. Th ey are waiting for the stories that they will take as history. In an interview, one of protagonists of the Tarnac group referred the dialectic of Guy Debord to the mystique of Simone Weil. «We used to like», she says, «the chaos and the grace»: a world in distress where gravity has exploded into chaos.
Joachim Olender responds with this work. He gives body to the void left by this explosion. Between video-installation and fi lm, he imagines a black box with three equal screens jutting out. The spectator sees the images of the investigation carried out by the artist on the places of the non-place: snowy landscapes, warehouses, roads and railways. Images of reality: there is nothing to see. In the inside, a fi lm is shown in a loop: it presents four sequences of «the terrorist arrest». Digital images taken from a video game. Between the two, the strange, worrying di fference is the link: the same mask hides the faces. Between realistic appearance and virtual truth, the «nothing» of «the non event» e nds its place. Tarnac. Le chaos et la grâce makes the structurally impeccable demonstration of the way in which film can still recount the void of a world where the same balaclava means «security» and «terror».
Catherine Perret (Excerpt)
Production: Le Fresnoy
