‘Opening Night’

Collection of found photographs of a party in Africa in the late 50’s presented as a sequence.

These pictures are set and sequenced in order to create a script, a story. Total appropriation of the meaning and the characters for a reformulation. These images are not found, copied, simulated or quoted but resumed as well. It’s right observation. What counts here is the articulation of these pictures, how they are used and streamed.

Here the beginning and the festive end are mixed. We’re going from the appreciation of the space and the guests to pictures where the codes of manners disappear. No need to idealize the reasons for being and the motivations of the place we are moving in. The set did not change, they are still dancing, they are trying to take advantage of its sensualism but the party has already gone back.

‘L’excès est cela même par quoi l’être est d’abord, avant toutes choses, hors de toutes limites’ says Bataille. (‘The excess is that by what the being comes first, before any things, beyond any limits.’)

text: Timothée Chaillou