INDEPENDANT CURATOR ´
THE DURATION OF THE PRESENT | Flora Ars+Natura, Bogota (Colombia) | 2015
Exhibition curator: Lina López
Artists: Francois Bucher / Lina López
1. A helicopter seed suspended in the middle of its journey to the ground. Its spinning motion creates unprecedented volumes in space: the miniature model of a pagoda, the rings of Saturn, the butterflies of a mythological tale where what is dead comes alive and is animated in the present.
2. Concentric circles are drawn in two dimensions: the millenary one –the growth rings of a tree trunk cut– and the instantaneous one, the circular waves of a drop falling rhythmically, traversing the rings of the trunk. Entwined in the woven of the duration of the present.
3. 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 movie:’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 an idyll with Marker, through the mythical and ethereal apparatus of cinema. There is no difference between the memories of his own life and those of the shooting 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.
4. Hélène –reached by that disease of the time called Alzheimer’s– 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 the 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 lovers is evident; a place without time that only exists in the duration of the present.
5. 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 time, the one that holds the lenses, the one that observes a time that stays; the threshold between two still photos taken half a century apart.