speculations (on how to enter and exit a forest)

2018, video dyptique (18 min 20 / 20 min 52)

Historical images alternate with a series of actions performed by the artist in the Bois de Vincennes, exploring the history of the site and evoking the ghosts that inhabit it through repeated gestures and temporal reversals.
Projected in a loop, each with a distinct duration, the videos propose a different and random association between the images and the sounds at each return. By moments, we can see photographs taken during the colonial exhibition of 1931 appearing from the dark: pavilions that do not exist today, animals locked in cages, human zoos. In another sequence, satellite images reveal the area of the forest where a migrant detention center is currently located. Later on, a list of exotic plant species imported for the colonial fair is machine-transcribed. Meanwhile, the artist plays on a gramophone in the woods a selection of traditional songs, including lullabies, from the former French colonies recorded at the time of the colonial exhibition.