Paris Paris | 2023
On some bridges in Paris, one can observe a gold reflection from afar. This is not gold paint, but tens of thousands of padlocks, placed there by couples wanting to symbolize their everlasting bond.
However, those padlocks will not remain there for eternity. They will eventually rust and fall off, or the city maintenance staff will cut them off with bolt cutters, as is usually the case . The weight of the padlocks is so strong that it can weaken the structure of the bridges and threaten their longevity. .
This picture illustrates the difference between fantasy and reality. For some people, and in the specific case of the French capital, it could even be defined as the Paris syndrome, i.e. a cultural and psychological shock, induced by an overwhelming discrepancy between the fantasized image of the City of Light and its hyper urban reality.
In the Paris – Paris performance, Luka Cvetkovic and actress Lucie Gurtler are searching for each other for 72h in the streets, parks and public space of Paris, a disposable camera in hand and as only instruction to take a picture whenever they have the genuine feeling to see the other appearing into the scenery.
All of their movements in the city are choreographed by their anticipation and fantasy to find each other, and this simple dispositive allows us to perceive a manifestation of sheer potentiality, making the performance an opening to think of the contingency that underlies our every encounter, and oportunity to “refute the usual protocol of time”. In that sense undoing the heaviness of anthropocentric expectations that burdens time and space, with it relaxing the metal particles of the Eiffel Tower, Paris from Hollywood, and history as exclusively human flavor of reality.
The photographies are the documentation of an « almost », of this very instant of pure potentiality and fantasized expectancy. Against the impossible odds of one in eleven million or 0.00000906%, to be precise, on the second day of the performance, they found each other.
-Text by Julie Marmet, exhibition shots at Espace Arlaud at PLATFORM
