INTRO| BARBARIC TERRITORIES| LE TEMPS SUSPENDU| ENTRETIEN
Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert
Soundtrack in collaboration with Y.E.R.M.O. (Yannick Franck and Xavier Dubois)
Europe’s fear of massive infiltration from without lies at the heart of Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert’s Collision Zone, a haunted staging of image and sound recordings collected by the artists in the border regions of the Mediterranean.
Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert’s cinematographic constructions extend beyond the realm of documentary film and fictional narrative to articulate a complex, dense and heterogeneous body of work. Oscillating between factual site description and symbolic encoding, the artists’ edited footage effectively undermines our common perception of reality.
Geologically (and metaphorically) speaking, the European and African continents are located in a so-called “collision zone” where the clashing of tectonic plates – both literally and figuratively – accounts for chronic instability and a permanent state of tension.
Collision Zone fundamentally questions the notion of borders, following the observation that continents in general, and Africa in specific, are actually moving and constantly changing their respective positions. Overpowering natural and geological forces slowly but surely extend or shift the world’s physical and geographical boundaries. Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert’s work thus draws its inspiration from a series of phenomena on the brink of the visible which appear to be regulating our world. By merging biological time and deep time, their installation creates a lapse of meditative time – a purposeful introspective slowdown interrupted by sporadic violent eruptions.
Reflecting the artists’ preferred working method, which is essentially based on independence and critical defiance, Collision Zone was produced in self-imposed autarky. Reaching well beyond a traditional artist’s travel account, it aptly questions our physical and moral certitudes by way of what could be termed “a critical inversion of a journey into the heart of darkness”.
Christian Mosar
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excerpt from catalogue 1, Luxembourg Pavilion – Venice Biennale 2009
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