Production : FNAGP and Suspended Spaces
Video HD, color, silent, 3 min 15
Fordlandia, Brazil

The video Capital Fordlandia I was made during a residency in Brazil with the collective Suspended spaces, of which Jan Kopp is a founding member. Bringing together international artists and researchers, Suspended spaces works on geographical territories whose future has been prevented for political, economic or historical reasons. Formed after the experience of Famagusta, a Cypriot ghost town, Suspended spaces then moved to Lebanon and more particularly to Tripoli, on the unfinished site of the Oscar Niemeyer International Fair. The collective then went to Brazil where the MAC, a contemporary art museum built by Niemeyer in Niterói, and the MACquinho, a cultural and social center, interface with the precarious populations of the Morro do Palácio community, work with the neighboring favela, in a violent and divided Brazilian society. Each of these stages has given rise to residencies, works, meetings, colloquia, publications, etc.

"Jan Kopp once again relies on a territory that is very historically marked, which also makes this work contextual. Fordlandia is the name given to a new city, a workers' town, built by the American industrialist Henry Ford in 1928 on a huge concession on the banks of the Rio Tapajós, in the state of Pará in Brazil. The ambition was to establish its own rubber production, essential for the manufacture of tires. An entire territory, with a hospital (designed by Albert Kahn, who made all the Ford factories in Detroit), and a school, thus emerged from a desire for control. The failure was obvious, however, and today all that remains of this ambition, which resulted in the destruction of part of the biosphere, is a ghost town of 3,000 inhabitants.Capital Fordlandia 1 was filmed in the Ford factory, which is still abandoned today. Once again, the choice of the frame is based on a place that is extremely connoted historically and culturally, and in suspension as space and in time. The camera overlooks the wooden floor of the factory, so that the viewer is immediately looking at a kind of material and abstract painting, a concrete painting that faces him. Then a man - the artist in this case - begins to arrange very precisely on the right side of the image objects or fragments of steel objects, probably coming, for the most part, from mechanical systems. This metallic carpet progressively extends on the left of the image, the man multiplying his efforts and gestures to cover the surface of operation which is also a surface of vision. Then this sheet made of steel forms of various configurations - a sort of repertoire of industrial forms - moves to the left before disappearing from view, leaving the initial painting in front of us. This play with ready-made forms is filmed in fast motion, so that the action and the sound give this piece a burlesque, Chaplinian feel - the Chaplin of Modern Times. In Capital Fordlandia 1, one returns to the starting point after having made a long detour through the world, in the world, after having collected a good number of objects of the world, those which are in any case available on the place of the action. On the surface, it is a zero-sum game, a way of doing and undoing to do nothing. But in reality, it was a question of drawing up a state of the place starting from the material memory of the place, of making history from nothing - a poor history with objects and forms of little -, it was a question of making an inventory by making appear and disappear vestiges, remains all the more striking that they are there only for one moment, only in the instant of the game." [...]
- Thierry Davila, Capitals (extract), 2017