L'Architecture du Paradis

Beware of democracy.

My work calls into question the ideological perspective of the West and the concept of democracy and its consequences. It employs architectural mapping as its working method.

I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible (signals, buildings, cities) and intangible (values, laws and culture).

The city is a fundamental expression of complexity and the exclusive creation of humanity. It embodies together artifice and sensation, the expressions of the human mind.

Transparency, as a democratic belief and value, is a new representation of visibility. Transparency has become a central reference point in political, economic and media discourses. Included in its values are those of information and communication, control and surveillance.

One of the constitutive elements for the landmarks and referents of the contemporary city is the concept of access (and its other half, exclusion): access to (or exclusion from) information, services, activities, sites or objects. Access takes the form of real or figurative security gates: smart cards, wireless data, passwords, etc. We carry with us, both physically and mentally, the constitutive elements of our perceptual reference points.

X-ray technology is emblematic of surveillance devices, not only those that detect organs or infected cells in the human body, or hidden commodities in transport containers, but also those that detect encoded information. X-ray technology exemplifies the values at stake in ideological transparency.

Transparency is the name given to the control of visibility.

L'Architecture du Paradis [1] is an immersive installation involving a series of five video sequences projected onto four wide walls, periodically interrupted by sound and light effects. The sequences refer to five ideal cities: Babylon, Jerusalem, Atlantis, New York and Paradise.

Three main problematics are involved:

1. 1. The major archetypes that historically and mentally permeate the Western world, as successive counterpoints to dreams of happiness: the lost paradise (the tomb, the temple, the Garden of Earthly Delights) or the promised land (the Celestial City, the egalitarian society, the great march of progress, the global village, etc.);

2. 2. The notions of political transparency and access (or exclusion);

3. 3. The status of the invisible.

The sound and light effects intermittently distract the spectator from her main focus of attention—the moving images—bringing her back to the very place in which she is standing. In other words, they bring the viewer back from the narrative images to the location/situation in which they occur.

During the projections, the viewer is a spectator. During the interruptions, the spectator becomes a target.

Each video sequence is made from a series of images from historic, archeological and art documents; X-rayed luggage and vehicles (see Fig. 1); vehicle plans; city maps and aerial views; and architectural ground plans, elevations and sections.

The sound composition is quadraphonic and uses human voices (an alto and a soprano). The text is excerpted from Plato's Timaeus and recited in American English.

I am interested in inspiring a reflection on what we are engaged in and what our commitment can be to carving out space for autonomy.