David Claerbout

What if animals stopped behaving like humans? And music was banned from the soundtrack? A non-narrative revisiting of the Disney classic, Jungle Book. To make his own version, the artist painstakingly redrew the frames of the original by hand, one by one, to create a familiar, yet entirely new experience.

Biological programming, still existent in today’s living beings, prompts a reflex to stay away from fire if it cannot be contained, such as in the case of a wildfire. A ‘meditation on fire’ may therefore sound like a contradiction. Inspired by the inquiry in the amount of power needed to produce a digital “still life” of fire, a task likely to set the computer system on fire, Wildfire confronts the biological and the digital. Prolonged shots of silenced fire comply with the notion of biological breathing time, while the abstract nature of the burning fire serves as a metaphor for the technological abstraction linked to its making, hinting at the increasingly abstract world we live in. In Wildfire (meditation of fire) the camera has been removed and disintegrated into a numerical system of binary codes. We are confronted with an illusion of an image, a hallucination, a visual construct of computing. These images offer an immersive experience of the otherwise un-experienceable.

Lasting over thirteen hours, Claerbout's film shows two men engaged in a discussion against the back-drop of a neoclassical house in southern France. An act of violence is repeated and re-enacted more than seventy times over the course of the film. Dissolving the boundaries between photography and film, Claerbout’s work puts into question the reassuring stillness of photography and the inevitable narrative progress of the cinematic image.

‘With Bordeaux Piece I have for the first time written dialogues, with the help of the actor Josse de Pauw, who plays the role of the father. Each shot lasts between two and three minutes, and there are seven shots forming the story, a bit like in a fiction short. The plot did not matter to me; I needed a succession of photographs, quickly seen situations, and I chose the story of Le Mépris by Jean-Luc Godard. It could have been a different story.