TENDER PASTURES / TENDRES PATURAGES
video / 2014 / 6'

With Michel Le Bayon

EN Tender Pastures focuses upon the relationship between text and topography. Using an extract of Beckett's Molloy, it evokes the tension between physical landscape and an inner landscape in relation to History, to the layers that form a fiction upon reality.

FR Tendres Pâturages pose un regard sur la relation entre texte et topographie par la mise-en-scène d’un extrait de Molloy de Beckett. Ce film évoque la tension entre la représentation d’un paysage géographique et d’un paysage intérieur. Le paysage engage à se positionner par rapport à l'Histoire, par rapport à ce que l’on décide de donner à voir, et donc sur ce qu’on veux dire. Il répresente les strates qui vont former la fiction qui repose sur la réalité.

A lone man stands in a flat, featureless landscape, and we hear his voice speaking and a strange, soft continuous sound. Nothing dramatic occurs over the video’s six minutes, with the exception of the screen going dark and words in French appearing three times. However, Le Bayon drives a variety of wedges into the integrity of the video’s story, generating many minuscule cracks. We become aware that the consistency of video and narrative is shattered the first time the screen goes dark, making us sit up, take notice and watch more closely. It is the moment when as Molloy says, in Le Bayon’s quotation from the novel, we see “with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath, all that too quite differently disposed.” It signifies the unfolding possibility of glimpsing something, folded up and hidden, on the other side of this vast, empty plain, in the depths of the mundane and uneventful everyday.



Koji Takeguchi, Chief Curator, MOCA Hiroshima, 2017