Jean-Marc Munerelle

L'Indian

4 - 26 June 2004

"It is history that catches us but the media that makes us cry."

The Indian is from a travelogue filmed in India. It is a journey to another continent, it is also a journey across the globe. It is a journey through the world and globalisation. The world is entirely explored by us Westerners, there is no longer a piece of it where our imagination is free to roam. It is the feeling of a closed universe, it is a bit like the end of myths - a vague claustrophobia.

Jean-Marc Munerelle has filmed the interiors of means of transport, the plane, the overcrowded train, etc. The world is like our apartment, it's like the end of the world. The world is like our flat, it is the limit of our perception, we move from one interior to another.

At artconnexion, three videos are set up, establishing a journey through the flat. Firstly, World Trauma Channel is presented on a monitor positioned in the entrance hallway, with the sound broadcast at a distance from the image. Balloons is a video from the last sequence of the film The Indian. Children play with plastic bags as if they were helium balloons. Finally, another extract from The Indian, subtitled International Transit Airport Glass Wall, shows a woman wearing a black chador and a man smoking a cigarette in an airport waiting hall.

Jean-Marc Munerelle creates contrasts between images and sounds, between immobility and bustle. In his films, he unknowingly captures a person smoking, waiting, eating... Simple, inconsequential, all too human activities. It is not a desire to trap, but to record moments of self-abandonment, in which there is no desire or will to represent. Jean-Marc Munerelle uses his camera in the street, in places of passage, transit, transport, telephone booths, petrol stations, in which there is apparently nothing going on except what the artist can capture.