Bertrand Lamarche
2021Cyclocity
Bertrand Lamarche
Produced for the Marcel Duchamp Prize, the architectural model Cyclocity focuses on the railway site in the city of Nancy, which repeatedly appears in Bertrand Lamarche’s work in its twofold aspect. on the one hand, the model pays attention to urban reality and its surroundings, in both their architectural and cultural dimensions. on the other hand, it breaks up this reality into fictional elements, that the artist then puts together and takes apart, as in a scenario. Seen from the Kennedy viaduct in Nancy (FR), this head-on panoramic view shows a reality that has been partially erased, exposing the urban gap left after the disappearance of the prison and the destruction of a portion of the Centre de tri Postal (the mail sorting center) built by Jean and Claude Prouvé. What thus appears is an emblematic case of the expressive dimension pertaining to a particular conception of architecture around 1968-73, an intrinsically precarious architecture, marked out for dismantling.
Cyclocity
Le Haut du Lièvre
Bertrand Lamarche
The film consists of a tracking shot across one of the biggest housing projects (400 meters long) ever made in France. Located on a hill in the city of Nancy, this project by Bernard Zerfuss is an idealistic gesture, typical of the 60’s, a project between land art and architecture that would soon be stigmatized among other giant projects and considered a mistake in many ways. The film was made ten years before the building project would be transformed to a shortened proposal. Half of it was turned down.The curves and the wavy moving image, due to the fact that the on-ride video was shot by the artist riding a bicycle, give the film a sense of fluidity and vertigo. The soundtrack is a Kate Bush song played backwards, emphasizing the rubbing like feeling in the image, like being in a melancholic nightmare.
Le Haut du Lièvre
Les Souffles
Bertrand Lamarche
Les Souffles (The Breaths) is the translation from one language to another, the transformation of sound into a writing in which the alphabet is yet to be defined. A phonogram is literally the written but arbitrary transcript of a sound. Here, the sound escapes from the vinyl and the writing is just some beeswax fixed to the disc, originally used to improve its performance. Chips form in each groove, with each new turn, and disappear to give way to new ones. The process is repeated and the wax tells us the music as the materiality of the lived moment. The disc rotates, the man dances on one side, the wax forms on the other, indefinitely. As if the real was inexhaustible and mechanical
The Breaths
Turning Man
Bertrand Lamarche
The video Turning Man presents a static shot of a silhouette of a character who is constantly turning around. Despite being in motion, the figure seems frozen, almost automated. The little man turns, turns and turns again, in an abstract setting that turns out to be a vinyl record on a turntable in a domestic interior. The beat of the music is reflected and embodied by the continual rotation of the character.
Turning Man
Autobrouillard
Bertrand Lamarche
The video Autobrouillard (Auto-Fog) is a polychromatic nocturnal view of an illuminated city progressively invaded by mist. Autobrouillard, filmed using a scale model just as Hollywood movies do for special effects, adapts the themes of city-as-set and the self-managed metropolis. We immediately recognize Bertrand Lamarche’s universe: the themes and motifs (architecture, maquettes, vortices, spires, hurricanes, fog) of an artist, a monomaniacal inventor, whose workshop produces miniatures of atmospheric phenomena. He makes machines that generate processes filmed by a built-in camera. The resulting image is often a spiral ia whirlwind in Tore [1998] and Station des eaux usées [Water Station, 2002]; Autobrouillard shows two rotating movements). Autobrouillard constructs the atmosphere of a fiction in which the common reference is an ideal autarkic city.
Autobrouillard
Cosmodisco
Bertrand Lamarche
Cosmodisco is a video installation that shows a turntable in motion shot by a videocamera that makes a revolution upon itself. The video projected in the full expanse of the exhibition space gives an aspiration feeling by the double movement in the animation, the record turning around the central axis of the turntable, while the videocamera spins perpetually around its lens axis, in a spiral movement. The weightless feeling is even increased in the pat- tern in the movie where the record grooves remind one of the rings of Saturn.
Cosmodisco
The Umbelliferous plot
Bertrand Lamarche
The Umbelliferous plot, which exists in the form of a digitally animated film and a text by the artist, initially published in the Nancy catalog in 1998 is a project to plant giant umbels to create a wild garden, “offering a dramatic shift in scale’’ and thrusting the visitor into an Alice in-wonderland like landscape.
The Umbelliferous plot
Terrain Vague
Bertrand Lamarche
Interested in architecture and in contemporaries landscapes, Bertrand Lamarche has designed several projects relatives to the site embracing the J.F.Kennedy viaduct site in Nancy. On this archetypal non-place with its unfinished look and chaotic images that were shot the Terrain Vague project, mounted as a long tracking shot that accompanies the circular sweep of the nocturne landscape by the beam of a lighthouse. The artist created a photographic panorama, referring to primitive cinema, that he used to shoot the movie. The video is in fact a tracking shot along a looped picture, which evokes the movement of an automatic security camera.
Terrain Vague
Vortex
Bertrand Lamarche
In Vortex, the subject was the upturned image of a cyclone, in an indefinable context, between cloudy sky and desert. Vortex is an event with neither narration nor beginning nor end. A meteorological phenomenon takes place in the exhibition room. An effect for a Hollywood disaster blockbuster where everything is revealed. Bertrand Lamarche shows a particular interest in “whirlpools” and “vortices” through devices with produce effects of ambience, total-immersion, subverting household materials and hardware. He is fascinated by thresholds, openings to infinity: whirlwinds, maelstroms and tidal waters, vortices or again gigantic urban agglomerations, the cities of tomorrow sometimes calling to mind playthings or giant models. He focuses on “hollow bodies”, pockets of emptiness existing in the real: tunnels, demolition sites, quarries but also tornados, black holes and ditches or channels of smaller dimensions.
Vortex