| The House, 2009-2010 |
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Video, animation, B&W and color, 4 min 30, looped Production: Suspended spaces Collections: Nouveaux Médias, Centre Pompidou; BPS22, Musée d'art de la Province de Hainau, Charleroi, Belgium To make the animation The House, Jan Kopp redrew a photograph he took of a reinforced concrete construction in the northern part of Cyprus. This construction remained unfinished, the residue of an unfinished building site, as there are hundreds on the island but also elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin, without the reason for this state being known (legal, financial, political problems?), Jan Kopp was particularly interested in this unfinished building "for its architecture, at the same time banal and reminiscent of the silhouette of a temple of ancient Greece". The animation first shows a landscape, which is summarized in three surfaces: the ground, a dark band representing the sea and the slightly misty sky. Then the animation reveals the unfinished architectural structure, as well as ghostly characters who, by gumming, then disappear. Accompanied by the discreet sound of the sea, this slow evolution of forms, far from the hardness of the geometric concrete structure, introduces a poetic and delicate look, where absence and disappearance seem to play with what the presence of such a construction means in the economy of the island. For in Cyprus, as elsewhere, to build is to take possession of the territory. Only the landscape remains unchanged in the strangeness of this reconstructed temporality. Faced with this imposing building, which forms a block, the completion of any planned and coherent human action seems here to be undermined. The human presence appears fragile, it unravels and can not appropriate any material, any identity, or unity. — Charlène Dinhut, text of the exhibition Suspended Spaces from Famagusta, Maison de la Culture, Amiens, 2010 |