Paris Paris | 2023
Unlike a desire that awakens alongside the sensation of old family photo albums, childhood toys, or some places you have visited, there is one that constitutes a non-place or even a not-yet-place.
A desire to see the memories in advance, or: Avenoir.
This is not to say The future and has nothing to do with horoscopes or destiny. It is an urge to feel, or rather, it is experiencing the memory of what has happened not in, but from the future. It proposes a hypothetical position constituting the present from the not-yet space, not-yet circumstances. This not-yet space constituting the present is how quantum mechanics explains the causation effect over unimaginably large distances. The problem is that if you say these large distances could be thought of as time and that time from the future affecting the present is possible, the whole theory of relativity collapses onto quantum physics. Both theories think of physical phenomena through the relationship of motion between the observed and the observer.
In the Paris – Paris performance, Luka Cvetkovic and actress Lucie Gurtler are looking 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
