KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial
KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial
KANTUTA QUIROS & ALIOCHA IMHOff - Overlapping Biennial
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FOR AN ARCHEOLOGY<br />
OF THE GAzE<br />
LE pEUpLE QUI MANQUE (<strong>KANTUTA</strong> <strong>QUIROS</strong> & <strong>ALIOCHA</strong> <strong>IMHOff</strong>)<br />
ART CRITICS & CURATORS<br />
If seeing is a power, nowadays it certainly manifests itself in its most extended form: we witness the transformation of the contemporary<br />
gaze into surveillance. Being at the core of present-day surveillance mechanisms is a phenomenon that can be understood<br />
through the increasing use of scanning technologies, as means of production for tracing systems and visual continuity.<br />
The network within which everybody is watching and is possibly being watched outdates Michel Foucault’s device of the Panopticon<br />
observation. Numerous artists have used critical analysis to dissect this ubiquitous transformation of modern gaze into<br />
surveillance: from Michael Klier’s Der Reise (1983) to Harun Farocki’s L’œil-Machine (2003), passing through Renaud Auguste-<br />
Dormeuil’s or Alain Declercq’s videos.<br />
These analytical operations belong to a broader history of the gaze and its counter-devices. The film makers and video directors<br />
have long taken interest in the deconstruction of the mechanisms connecting the act of watching to the question of power, and<br />
leading to a regime of generalized surveillance.<br />
Recalling the counter-devices invented by these artists, film makers and video directors (whose most contemporary version would<br />
in this case be sousveillance), we aim to see what are the work techniques we could use today for future resistance. In a brief<br />
attempt to reiterate these radical gestures, we will see how the invention of counter-watching has developed, confronted with the<br />
colonial, patriarchal, mechanical or panoptical watching. This was possible in the first place only due to those inversions in the<br />
sequence of watching, that reveal the mechanisms of reification, guardianship, and control. In order to build genuinely democratic<br />
information practices, contemporary mediactivism has tried to advance new “polyphonic” networks of images. The rhizomatic<br />
strategies involved still had to deal with the hegemonic control of image production and dissemination in the mass and official<br />
media. Finally, one will infer from the historical practices of experimental cinema, which even more propose a pure and simple<br />
dissolution of seeing into touching and feeling, that the invention of a third eye and of tactile watching is the final effort of abolishing<br />
the imprint of power over watching.<br />
“Knowing the Forces at pLay” (aLain decLercq)<br />
French artist Alain Declercq’s work belongs to a history of techniques used in reversing the emission points of the look. For him,<br />
escaping surveillance has developed into surveilling the surveillance, enacted by vigilance produced from its own moving, performing,<br />
photographing, and filming body. Declercq has been working for over a decade on control societies, using logic to the<br />
extent of unveiling its limits, surveilling the systems of surveillance themselves. One can detect in his obstinate inquiries some<br />
fragile game between exposing the technologies of power, truth regimes and fictional evidence, suspicion, paranoia and unexpected<br />
reversals of reality.<br />
In Hidden (2008) he diverts security regulations by placing a pinhole camera obscura in front of the constructions and buildings<br />
protected by the city legislation post Ground Zero, thus constituting an inventory of forbidden places of representation. Using mise<br />
en abîme and the demystification of points of view, the scopic lens cut is impressed within the frame, roundly shaped by an absolute<br />
eye. Surveillance is therefore replicated in the frame itself, revealing “not the invisible but a visible whose visual character was<br />
forbidden”, in Gérard Wajcman’s 1 words.<br />
In Embedded, which was filmed during the students’ manifestations organized in Paris in 2006, among the forces of order, and<br />
mainly among civilian police officers, he infiltrates amongst the infiltrated, only to be exposed later on. For Mike, an undecidable<br />
piece of docufiction on the iconography of international plots, Alain Declercq makes up a character, Mike, who is in charge of surveying<br />
the actions of international networks. In a troubling ballet of fiction and reality, on June 24th 2005, a criminal brigade and<br />
some French anti-terrorists enter his studio in Bordeaux, accusing him of “working with the enemy”. Alain Declerq would be interrogated,<br />
his studio searched, and all of his documents and art works carefully analyzed. He would then realize he had been himself<br />
observed for the last several months. As Alain Declerq would say later, while reproducing on stage the rooms of this perquisition,<br />
“knowing the forces at play” equals terrorism for any forces of order. His work of fictionalized reality allows him to unmask the way<br />
security and surveillance dynamics feed themselves from staging reality and the way fictionalizing actually permits them to exist.<br />
While Alain Declercq’s work can be seen as typical for the so-called “reversed surveillance” strategies, artists and film makers<br />
have invented throughout history different visual devices and perceptive protocols, to free themselves of the neutralization and<br />
1. Gérard Wajcman, Portrait de l’artiste en Persée, in Alain Declercq, éditions Blackjack, Loevenbruck, 2010<br />
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