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| Bertrand LAMARCHE -view of the viaduc JFK, 1992 Slideshow - ( 15 slides) edition of 5 |
Another thread in Lamarche’s production has been images of the city, including Methandal (1997) and Nancy (Centre d’art/Espace Jules Verne, Brétigny-sur-orge, 1998-99). In the latter, the accompanying publication portrays the city from the John Kennedy Viaduct, as an unfinished landscape, a place for passing throughly Lamarche’s text proposes that: it is the void that orchestrates the site. It singles out each element, outlining each thing, and reveals what was merely visible before. That is why the city seems unreal from the viaduct.
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| Bertrand LAMARCHE -view of the viaduc JFK, 1992 Slideshow - ( 15 slides) |
It resembles a toy, a gigantic model, set down who knows where, but in which nothing is the outcome of chance. Despite the complexity of the site, everything seems to respond to a particular orderliness, to give us, who are on the viaduct, the proof of some ideal vision or some phenomenon played out before our eyes, which we can only sense. Trains creep slowly by. They glide gently before the buildings. This produces an effect of slow motion, plunging the whole panorama into a time frame peculiar to it: an extended present, drawn out like an elastic band, a slowness played out on the railway tracks, foregrounded, which turns the city into an ongoing event, and something ever-imminently obsoletely.
A heavy languor pervades the whole, a utopia become dystopia, mutely hallucinogenic. Into the wasteland along the viaduct, a vast planting of umbrella-like grasses is proposed, each from three to four metres tall with poisonous, stinging stems, an Umbelliferous plot. This world is sensorial, enticing, addictive, omnipresent. A physicality both tenuous and engrossing, distant but mesmerizing.
Text by Peggy Gale, 2000.
