ARTIST | SOLO SHOW
THE DURATION OF THE PRESENT | Flora Ars+Natura, Bogota (Colombia) | 2015
Artists: Lina López / François Bucher
The color photo of the woman who lived a love story in black and white with Chris Marker, back in 1960, a platonic and secret story that was forever invoked in a science fiction film -La Jetée. The film is a magical object full of poetry and dream, the story of a love suspended in time. Helene Chatelain is the name of the woman who was fixed in that eternal portrait of love that is not consumed; Of the circular time that is conjugated without ceasing in the film. Helene walks in the present, by the same “Jardin des Plantes” in Paris where she lived her idyll with Marker, and with that mythical and ethereal apparatus of cinema. There is no difference between the memories of his own life and the filming of the film, there is no distance, everything is undifferentiated in his memory. A mirror reveals two hemispheres of Helene’s face, as a portal between various dimensions, a central axis, a deep horizon, the thousand and one faces of time.
Hélène -reached by the disease of the time that is the Alzheimer- walks with us through the same gardens where he walked half a century ago. The time of love is paradoxical, the stuffed animals of the Natural History Museum are also, and so is the cinema, and memory. We visit the redwood tree trunk cut that appears in La Jetée, the part where the central character of the film -the filmmaker’s avatar in love- shows the woman he loves, the future time, beyond the last ring of the Trunk, where he comes from. The impossible encounter of the lovers is evident; A place without time that only exists in the duration of the present.
Hélène picks up her hair with her hand, the gesture goes through time, transcends, travels. Only the cinema can perceive it, only the traveler in the time of the glasses, the one who observes a time that stays; A threshold between two stills taken half a century away.