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Livraison
Jean-Pierre Rehm
Hotel Europa is, first and foremost, the affirmation of a substance: here, rock againstrock, there a prow of set stone, Laocoon and his reptiles alone on a square, blocks of flats rising high all around, houses forming layers, strata and jags, zigzagging or straight tarmacroads, etc. With the exception of the very occasional portrait, always outside, and always apparently more bound up with the ensemble and thus making the general rule even moremanifest, the landscape unfolded against its uniformly blue sky byHotel Europa is wholly governed by the law of petrifaction. Not that this insistence of the mineral is new in thework of Monique Deregibus. Her first series (1989–99), taken in the arid lands of New Mexico, was constructed out of the search for a panorama, and created the sublimely mattspectacle of a hard, silent nature. Tangled at random into a bundle of grey shades, several themes can be made out here: the dream of origins – both the origins of the world and ofits photography, the dry charm of a lunar Arcadia still peopled with memories of natives now gone, the wish to build a monument, a “calm block” dedicated to History beforeHi s t o ry. In short, here was that “invitation to the voy a g e” typical of those years of vo l u n t a ry wandering metamorphosed and also protected by gelatin-silver into flat “stone dreams”. But these rocky expanses are not wholly contained by this oneirism. Freed of their flagrantallegorism by insistence, they also play another role, one that happens to be more decisive: that of a proliferating base, established without a hierarchy, an endemic outbreak of photographic allove r. Pictorialism (the photographic tradition that, understood in a bro a d e r sense, well beyond its historical phase, continues to converse with painting conceived as amaterialisation of a unified re p resentation and of the promised world that unfolds within it) is corrupted here, abandoning its ties to the closed image and joining the radical loosenessof Cézanne’s watercolours. A reverse realism, adrift through the middle. What matters is not to make a world and, by means of framing, to edge with emphatic strokes the line ofits balanced edges, but to put the world forward as a maker of intensities, a sensor of reflections, the mason of that building described by Deleuze in his discussion of HermanMelville’sBartleby: “It is primarily a world in process, an archipelago. Not even a puzzle whose pieces could be fitted together to form a whole, but more like a dry-stone wall,without cement, in which each element stands on its own and yet in relation to the others: isolates and floating relations, islands and inter-islands, moving points and sinuous lines,for Truth always has ‘jagged edges’.” It is in this manner that these American landscapes mix the old and the new, that they sketch the rough ground from which other images,other registers and genealogies will venture forth. In this manner: in other words, herein lies the birth of the mannerism – if I can use that term, and insofar as it can shake off itsmodernist anathema – that characterises the work of Monique Deregibus. Here, the origin is a trick, which leads to other tricks. The origin is free of the origin; it is a lap, a foundpiece of rubble, the makeshift support of an opened wall. We are familiar with Ernst Lu b i t s c h’s famous advice to budding cameramen, as often quotedby Godard: “Start by learning how to film mountains before you go on to actors”. Monique Deregibus has taken this recommendation of an elementary phase. But whatdoes the injunction actually mean? Why might rocky profiles offer an ideal vector towards faces and bodies and their actions? By virtue of their immobility? Or of their resemblanceto actors who have always already exceeded the frame? While it is important not to neglect the enigmatic quality carried by any spoken word, what Lubitsch is referring to here is nodoubt the diffuse art of politeness. This savoir-faire, a playful one judging by the master’s films, does not aim for a viewpoint that embraces a fine totality, or seek the sign of theuniversal behind the guise of singularity. Rather, it is a combination of tact, suddenness and precaution, a weighing of the right distance. And the figure of Bartleby is, as we know,e xe m p l a ry of this infinite affability and expert in the art of deferral, to the point of crow n i n g him with the halo of a comic messianism. Now, a comparable politeness is at work in Hotel Europa, which, page after page, adoptsBartleby’s own words, each image stubbornly but not brusquely proffering its “I would prefer not to”. And so, in succession and overlapping, there is an “I would prefer not to”offer the detailed account of a journey, “I would prefer not to” travel, “I would prefer not t o” be in the centre of a city, “I would prefer not to” undertake a sociological study, “I wouldprefer not to” let the lens take the people and things hostage, “I would prefer not to” believe in the autonomy of the image (that one, the target image, was sent sinking by theprofile of a shooting gallery in a fairground1), “I would prefer not to” differentiate between Marseille, Sarajevo and Odessa, under cover of picturesqueness, “I would prefer not to”mix up Marseille, Sarajevo and Odessa, under the pretext of globalisation, “I would p re f e r not to” forget the past utopias of which signs still linger in the streets, “I would pre f e rnot to”be blind to the effects of time on buildings. Etc. As strong as the invisible seism that shakes on their 1 In the exhibition at the Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, where this series wasp resented, this image, a knowing nod to the 19th-century idea of the picturesque, was placed at the entrance to a room where Monique Deregibus had chosen to show the Odessa stepssequence from The Battleship Potemkin. foundations a handful of houses on the edge of a curve,as clear as that movement in which the sea becomes land and a boat a buildingalongside the quay, this kind of false indecision shakes up the composition of the images, blurs both the attraction of the series and the refusal of narrative. In a word, it underminesdelimitations. And here we have a key to the dominant minerality: the unyieldingness of frontiers. Whereas the first series showed the (unlined) exteriority of American landscapes–screens filtering light– Hotel Europa brings before us territories that are just as receptive to broad daylight, but their configurations and obstacles are of another kind; they arezones. What do the photos tell us about these zones? They seem to share three characteristics. 1.They are limit spaces: whether a valley between mountains, a slim expanse between sea and earth, a line between two pavements, a wasteland between two neighbourhoods, a transitarea, etc., all have identities forged by multiple contiguities. This intermediary quality gives them a deceptive feeling of familiarity and similarity, yet they do not belong to each otherso much as add themselves, like a chaotic supplement, to other places that have clear limits. That is why the gaze loses itself in them, and perhaps why that group of squattingboys seems to be studying a map so as to get out of, or into, the zone. 2. And yet these middle areas do generate a substance of sorts. This substance is waiting. And all the signs,signals, placards, posters, buildings, facades, warehouses and vehicles seem to be part of this purgatory, becoming the unscaled elements of a giant set. In other words, the zone istheatrical. The time there is always midday, its depth is always trompe l’oeil and its props are interchangeable. An assemblage of containers can become a group of buildings or aclutter of crates, a museum room or cinema look like a hangar, etc. That is what makes it photogenic, its malleability to the fantastical effects of contamination. 3. Devoid of action,this theatre of expectancy also has no actors. And when figures are captured there, it is often in bunches or unmoving assemblies that echo the sculptural groups. Apart from afew passers-by, the zone is empty, uninhabited. Not pristine, but deserted. Instead of the photographer’s sovereign mobility, here it is her subjects who have hit the road, figures deserting their ground. The zone is the trace extended to the size of a migration. Witness the recurrence of means of communication: roads, bridges, harbours, banks, railways, avenues but also pedestrian crossings, tunnels, paths, but also buses, wagons, cars, trucks, boats, children’s buggies, that traverse or structure nearly all these images. If, despite itsreluctance to exhibit itself, the travel theme remains decisive, this zone has changed its sign. Travel no longer moves things, no longer moves itself.The invitation to the voyage is itself petrified. Why? Because it does not express the aspiration of a single person, but creates underlying connections between the traces of constrained multitudes. The zone is a space saturated with marks left by crowds now gone. That is why this zone occupies not so much a place as a time: the intermediary duration between a near past and anunpredictable future. This means that the space cannot be transformed into a monument, or elevated to memorial status. At the most, like the ram on the heights over Sarajevo, itmay be assigned the role of a reminder, a pense-bête, a displaced memento, an “emergency living unit” displaced across the urban topography. Nondescript, without relief in its precariousness, yet singular, each one is even more unique in its echoes: Mediterranean migrations in Marseille, the end of Soviet communism and the memory of the revolt atOdessa in 1905, the years of the siege in Sarajevo. All of which may help us grasp the meaning of the very fine title, peeled away from animage: Hotel Europa. Far from indicating a withdrawal back into Europe, the belated feedback and confirmed domiciliation after the exodus to the wide-open spaces over theAtlantic, or fantasising about an already federated union in these zones, this sign distributes a few of its places and their images like so many elements in a possible arrangement. Afilm for the viewer to edit, Hotel Europa houses the fixed sketches of a theatre of memory to be set in motion to the rhythm of recent history. And its photosmay have the coloursof a “3615 G Envi”2stuttered in yellow and black above the crest of armoured thighs, or the last call for tenders from the “Capital”just as much as those of the Odessa hotel facing the famous steps from the massacre in Eisenstein’sBattleship Potemkin.Taking their substance from already existing images, from chronicles, memories and fictions, and evenfrom the kind of hallucinations experienced by Benjamin in Marseille (again), putting these back into circulation free of any kind of fascination, Hotel Europa is intended not asan album of illustrations but as a system of correspondences. We see Marseille divided along its edges, but also segueing into Odessa, into Sarajevo. IfHotel Europa is a book, inother words, not a report but a project, it is for each gaze to print its own captions. Photographic sovereignty may as a result lose some of its loftiness, may drop the austereframe of its descriptive assurance, but such images, floating ambiguously, house a gapped community, whose discretion is taken up in a kind of narrative whose continuation was 2The 3615 is paying number on the pre-Internet French Minitel (telematic) service, and “G Envi” puns feebly on “J’ai envie”: “I want” or “I desire”–TRANS. prophesied byBenjamin: “Narration will remain. Not in its eternal form, with its secret, splendid warmth, but in insolent, audacious forms of which we as yet know nothing.”
1 In the exhibition at the Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, where this series was presented, this image, a knowing nod tothe 19th-century idea of the picturesque, was placed at the entrance to a room where Monique Deregibus had chosen toshow the Odessa steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin.
2 The 3615 is paying number on the pre-Internet French Minitel (telematic) service, and “G Envi” puns feebly on “J’aienvie”: “I want” or “I desire”–TRANS. .
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