Le Plateau
Paris

Titre - manifeste de Marcia Hafif
© Marrakech Press

BEGINNING AGAIN

 

A programme of events conceived by Mathieu Copeland and Philippe Decrauzat for the empty spaces of Le Plateau.

2nd session:

BEGINNING AGAIN
Thursday 15 & Friday 16 May 2014
Free entry starting at 6pm*

A retrospective of Ben Van Meter’s films in dialogue with works by Francis Baudevin, Marcia Hafif, David Lamelas, Charlotte Moth, Phill Niblock, Karin Sander and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Let’s start. Empty spaces, as suspended during a break, waiting for the next exhibition. A space and time in-between. As a prelude, the image projected and collided with, like an overlap of multiple programmes and divided durations, permitting the creation of an environment.

As a point of departure, a “retrospective” of Ben Van Meter’s films. Developing his vocabulary through syncopated editing with de-synchronized and discordant sound, an informal blurring of the image with unnatural colours, he records a generation, goes to the San Francisco Trips Festival (1966), and re-creates all its astringent aroma in psychedelic mode.

At the centre of Le Plateau’s exhibition space, Me, Bruce and Art (1966) appears to us like a mechanical piece with two meanings. Recording a journey, from start to finish, in a time-frame provided by the televised interview between Bruce Conner and Ben Van Meter.

Here, experimental film appears to be the subject in its relation to television and time. The mode of production and the TV studio set’s backstage are revealed, like a dialectics of deconstruction.

“A documentary of the event from the point of view of a goldfish in the Kool-Aid bowl.” (Ben Van Meter on his film SF Trips Festival).

A selection of screened works is presented in relation to Van Meter’s films. Light sources are multiplied, like a muffled, rhythmic ballet, with differentiated and continuous loops.

Amplification of matter within a given perimeter, Grand Street (Phill Niblock), an inventory and archive of a suburban architectural development (Marcia Hafif), the reality of an event made to be photographed (Charlotte Moth), a plunge into an interior (Cerith Wyn Evans), structural reflection about projection, and the remake of a logo projected onto the floor (Francis Baudevin).

These works, like bachelor constructions, assert their autonomy and function here as myriad notices, which augment, appropriate and complicate our reading.

*Continuous screenings until 10pm