Topographies De La Guerre- LE BAL

This evening for our contemporary arts class we took a visit to Le Bal situated in the 18th arrondissement near to Place de Clichy. Not really the sort of area in which one would expect to find an edgy, highly contemporary space as there are probably more kebab shops than people. The centre (and I refer to it as a centre because it is neither a gallery selling work or a museum with a collection) is tucked up a tiny passageway called La Défénce which our teacher informed us used to be a hang out for prostitutes and drug dealers until a few years ago. Lovely. Back in the 20s the building was a vast dance hall, hence the name Le Bal but it underwent numerous changes through the years, e.g. into a underhand betting shop etc but 2 years ago, with the gradual gentrification of the area the centre opened. Although it has the clean cut, white walled appearance of many contemporary art galleries, the centre is somewhat different in that it only shows documentary work. The shows, often film, photography and photojournalism inform and educate as well as inciting though and debate. Although not always their deliberate intention, they are often interpreted to be extremely political and controversial. This thread reminded me a little of Melik Ohanian's film I saw at the weekend. When we are shown a slice of reality which does exist but which we chose not to acknowledge it can often conjure negative reactions or total dismissal. I suppose if I had visited the current show, Topographies De La Guerre on my own and without a helpful guide I too would have perhaps been quick to pass through the works reading them as a bleak and depressing reflection of the current state of the world.

Reading into it a little further it was actually fascinating to see such an alternative presentation of the war, focusing on the sites, the positions, the geological terrain or built spaces instead of the human action. With the blood, fire, explosion,action and bodies usually so closely entwined with the image of war, one was able to step back and have a more broad, philosophical view which allowed you to ponder the dynamic between war and space.

Some works which have stuck in my mind are Paolo de Pietri's "To Face" collection of landscape photographs capturing demure signs from WW1 such as stonewalls, bunkers, graves and trenches in dramatic locations such as the Alps. What's most interesting is how these once crucial, solid infrastructures have in time, been eroded and overrun by vegetation. It is almost as though nature had wanted to assimilate these entities to make them it's own.



The Lebanese artist, Walid Raad's work was also memorable from a visual point of view as beautiful patterns had been created despite the reason behind there placement being a rather morbid one. The work is based on the civil war in 70s Beirut. The artist spent several yaers removing bullets and shrapnel from the walls, cars and trees of the city. He kept a note of where he found every single bullet and photographed the sites of his findings. He then placed coloured dots over the photographs which corresponded to the bullet's diameter and the mesmerizing hues found on the bullets' tips. It was not until 10 years later that he realized that ammunitions manufactures follow distinct colour codes to mark and identify their cartridges and shells and their origin.




The artist is interested in archiving the war through fragments of memory. The works consist of sketches, photographs and dots all overlapping and covering each other to represent the dissorganisation of memory. It is only after listening to the guide that we are all informed that the work is actually totally fictitious, an imaginary narrative made to create a memory. During times of war, the artist believes we have no time to form memories as everyday action dominate our lives. It is after that one must construct an artificial memory to archive the event. This struck me as somewhat unexpected as I had totally believed the work and apart from the words of the guide, their was nothing to lead us to believe otherwise. The artist has taken a similar angle on his work on numerous occasions and it is presented under the project title- The Atlas Group. The website sheds a bit more information on his contemporary form of documentation-

http://www.theatlasgroup.org/

Donovan Wylie's "Outposts" was also more complex than first met the eye. His dramatic photographs capture military watchtowers in the beige, barren landscape of Afghanistan. These small buildings possess great power in that they can control war through vision. What interested this Irish photographer specifically about these watchtowers was that they were in fact British watchtowers built by the British military on the hilltops along the border between Northern and Southern Ireland. Following the Saint-Andrews Agreement, the watchtowers were dissmantled, moved and reassembled in another theater of operation in Afghanistan.It is interesting to think how the placing of such simple structures can transform the territory of any nation into a "war territory". Apparently, the watchtowers have since been dissmantled and moved to the arctic to survey its ecological decline. Thinking of the three locations, the rolling, lush, green Irish hills, the barren, dry Afghanistan landscape and now the crisp, watery, white arctic landscape is particularly thought-provoking. Our only questions were whether the towers were painted to be better camouflaged within the different areas and also the cost of moving the towers. This was surely considerably more that the cost of the towers themselves?



Other exhibits included maps created by inhabitants of a refugee camp. It was interesting to think about how a map can be a military and an artistic tool to place you in a space. All maps are primarily just a reinterpretation of space and "every border depends on where you are". Another set of photographs which appeared to be shot in Iraq were in fact of a californian military base created with identical conditions to the combat zone in the Middle East and with the purpose of training the soldiers before being sent to fight. With the help of top Hollywood film directors, the core purpose was to reproduce a setting in order to better master the original.

I am definitely no fan of war, and struggle to see its benefits amid all the problems it causes. I would probably even go so far as to call myself a pacifist. Despite this, I found this show thoroughly thought provoking and captivating. Avoiding the obvious cliches of war allowed one to delve further into the other array of complexities left in its wake.