EMMANUELLE BAYART

fr / en

SUPERSTRUCTURE, Emmanuelle Bayart and Timo Kirez, 2013
Installation, reproductions of a postcard showing Geneva, stand for postcards completely painted white

1) Like Brecht who wrote "A picture of the Krupp factory doesn’t tell anything about the Krupp factory."
2) Like Adam Smith who spoke about "The invisible Hand of the market".

3) Like Marx who turned the idealistic dialectic of Hegel into a materialistic one.
4) Like Slavoj Zizek who thinks that ideology is two faced like a coin, one side representing the official announcements of values in politics and the other side the dark and dirty secrets.
5) Like Jean-François Lyotard, who writes in "La Condition postmoderne" that the time of "Métarécits" isn’t over.

Geneva is giving itself an image. But, as Heiner Müller writes in his Poem "Pictures" :
"Pictures signify everything in the beginning. Are keepable. Roomy.
But the dreams congeal, become form and disillusionment.
Already the sky holds no more pictures. The clouds, seen from an
airplane: steam which takes away the view."

Representations are there to block your view. Reality is a narration, a construction. The image of Geneva : a ghost. Or may be a trick, like the Trojan Horse. Infinitely reproduced on postcards. We need to turn the reality upside down. To shake it. To make reality impossible. Disillusion might save us. As it takes the steam away.