| Quelques Mouvement cycliques, 2004 |
| Video in five chapters Production: Ateliers des Arques Collections: Frac Alsace; Collection publique d'art contemporain du Conseil Général de la Seine-saint-Denis Quelques mouvements cycliques - a work in five parts made from images borrowed from the inhabitants of a small village in the Quercy region of France - mixes histories and fragments of territories (rural, urban, maritime...) The work is conceived as a geographical and social patchwork where associations and contradictions of meaning (individual/collective; playing/working; order/chaos; eating/being eaten...) As always, the artist disturbs our reference points by a work of deconstruction and reconstruction, both on the images and on the sound. In the part Für Ulysses, Kopp stages a flock of sheep whose movements are choreographed (originally) by a sheepdog. The sheep form a single body, a body whose movements the artist punctuates with a game of slowed down, accelerated, backward, and freeze-frame. In doing so, he creates chaos where order reigned. The country space takes on the scale of a battlefield where stars and red crescents * are forced to obey and bend, filled with terror... The herd driven by Kopp becomes a metaphor for war, like Giono's novel The Great Herd. In the same way, the artist uses juxtapositions, alternations of places, slowness and accelerations, without temporal transition between the chapters to place his herd in the center of the work, surrounding it with anodyne and timeless saynètes. They act like old family photos for which we no longer have the key to reading (but which we like to keep because they are part of our history): a fishmonger skilfully skins a monkfish, a child plays in a garden, a man dances on a quay under the sun... The flashbacks bring the past into the present; life goes on, life stops, life starts again, like "some cyclic movements". * The herds mixing in the mountain pastures, each owner identifies his animals by the distinctive sign painted on their backs. |