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You imagine yourself with a bar in the bed, or with the bed in the kitchen
Tu t’imagines avec un comptoir dans le lit, ou un lit dans la cuisine
2005
. San Francisco Cinematheque presents "We Cannot exhibit It: The Videos of Pierre Yves Clouin," Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA
2003
. World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2002
. MIX NYC, Anthology Film Archives NYC, New York, USA
A text by program director Remco Vlaanderen - WorldWide Video Festival 2003 - about Thé au riz & Strong Enough
Thé au Riz, 2002 Video, 15’30 min., colour
“You see stuff and, at the same time, hear other stuff. For example, you see a guy's butt in the street and you hear someone talking about his taxes. Totally unrelated”, ponders the voice-over in Thé au Riz. Pierre Yves Clouin juxtaposes a sound recording of an intimate conversation in bed with his lover with lengthy images of public spaces — a shopping mall, a café, a street in New York City.
The conversation meanders along, as a wide view of a landscape filmed through an airplane window passes by. The altitude of the plane reduces rivers and mountains to mere cracks and crevices. All sense of proportion is lost. The scene changes, so does the conversation.
- What do you mean, the bar that’s higher than you?
- What?
- You said: on the bar, which is higher than you.
- Oh yeah, when you’re sitting on the bed here the bar over there is higher than me.
There doesn’t appear to be any sense of logic or direction in this conversation, nor do the changing scenes seem in any way related to each other. It appears to be just pillow talk accompanied by random images shot with a handycam. The man continues to speak in a soft voice about some friends, the places in Paris they visited, which route they took to get there, and where they had lunch. We see a kid wearing an Adidas jacket waiting for his dad who’s using a public phone in some mall while a voice-over discusses a female duck and her ducklings. Totally unrelated. When he asks his friend about the leftover pasta we see the image of someone reading a paper in an outdoor café. What remains however throughout the entire fifteen minutes of the video is the strong sense of intimacy. Clouin immerses you in a dream-like state where the apparent absence of logic is not questioned.
Thé au Riz is a thought-provoking and challenging work that raises a number of questions about the blurring of the boundaries between public and private space, in particular about the relationship between the individual and the media, which are increasingly invading people’s private lives, just like we se