Again the local (or locale) is addressed in a more overtly political sense in the film of the artists Y Liver (David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni), called Le Soleil C'est Definitif (une page de l'histoire héroïque) which deals specifically with youth and authority within a cycle of two separate days (14 July, and September 6, 2005). The events take place in the Rue de Maroc, XIXe district of Paris, where young people 'sans culottes' are playing and throwing fireworks or firecrackers on the annual Bastille day. Three months later at the same location forced evacuations of so-called 'unhealthy buildings' (the third in a series of such State interventions) were undertaken on the instructions of the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Executed under the auspices of the infamous CRS, the images are conceptually presented and edited as if they were two diary records of the days events. The intervening period implies, though it is not stated, an apparent lack of consultation in what amounts to forced and/or arbitrary evictions from the same locality. In what the artists call a 'guerilla urbaine' the film exposes what was little more than an deliberately authoritarian show of force at the expense of a serious engagement with the local population. In short it appears an arbitrary revenge on African immigrants in Paris, and is contradictory, perhaps, for the earlier events strangely were little more than youthful and over-exuberant celebrations of a French State holiday. Hence it questions (or, at least points to) the arbitrary use of power and social confrontation, without considering what constitutes the legal rights of minorities and autonomous ethnicities, let alone their lack of political representation in the city. A mantra of Latin words 'ludo' ludis' 'ludorum' 'imitatio' 'imitationis' and 'oppositionem' flash periodically across the screen. The words intimate in turn a game, imitation, and opposition, suggesting we are as much a party to a one-sided political theatre as any ameliorating or serious-minded social intervention. A postscript and descriptive consequence of the September 6th event (dated 17 September, 2005) is taken from the newspaper Libération and added as a textual appendix. The film-video in the exhibition is placed in a Ministry office space turned dark room on the second floor, and the work imposes a condition of sudden awareness on the viewer. A tennis net has been stretched across the room, emphasising the political-social game playing that is taking place. That is to say that we find ourselves in a public building location at the heart of an institutional authority, but presented with arbitrary and unjust experiences that exist between the French State and Parisian-ethnic street life.
(Mark Gisbourne)
The phantom of a space contested between controlling structures and appropriative gestures, and the question of the position of the artist, poised between the public scene and the personal dimension, reappear in the video by Y Liver. This partnership between a French jew, David Liver, and an Italian, Rugiada Cadoni, explores the problems connected with the building up of identity and the mechanisms of exclusion of the “other”, whether racial, social or sexual. The video Le soleil c’est définitif (une page de l’histoire héroïque), made in collaboration with Xavier Frédéric Liwer, intermingles scenes of the celebrations of the 14th of July in the Paris XIXème arrondissement with images of the evacuation of a building occupied by Africans, shot in the same place during the 2005 uprising. Rendered visually indistinguishable by the elimination of the crucial moments of the clashes, both scenes convey the same feeling of inanity, of ineffective and pointless agitation. The street scenes are interspersed with those of an abstract discussion (indoors) among a group of young intellectuals (the three artists themselves) who are extraneous to the events, as at bottom are the protagonists themselves, imprisoned as they are in their respective roles by the logic of the contrast which governs the mechanisms of identity; a logic underlined by the structure of the video, in the rhythmical alternation of the images and the superimposed words, but also by the physical space of the installation, divided in two by a tennis net stretched across the room. (Giuliana Altea)
