PRESS ETC

Saison Video - march 2024 - Interview with Mo Gourmelon

​Mo Gourmelon : On the occasion of the development of your new project “Where the ruins grow” (2023, city of Toulouse, Cantor Dust Lab), you told me you wanted to develop a series which extends the history and the universe of “Cantor Dust Man” (2009 Le Fresnoy) and the following “3D Puzzle” (2010 with Géode). You continued by saying that like these two films you would like to keep the experimental, hybrid form, the freedom that you had for these projects guided by plastic and conceptual ideas. First of all, where does this name Cantor Dust come from, which is rather pretty and poetic and which we feel “made”. Can you introduce us to this set that you called “Iterative Memories of Cantor Dust Man”? How does “There where the ruins are born” embody a sequel?

Sébastien Loghman: The title of the series “Iterative Memories of Cantor Dust Man” comes from “Cantor dust” which means, in English, “Cantor dust”. This mathematical set was "made", to use your expression, by the 19th century scientist Georg Cantor. This is the first example of a fractal in the history of mathematics. To put it in perspective, fractals were already in nature before appearing in math. For example, take the romanesco cabbage that appears in my film Cantor Dust Man: if you look at a detail of this vegetable, that detail resembles cabbage as a whole. Thus, we find the same structure at different scales. And this is also true for the mountains, the snowflakes and the coasts of Brittany.

The idea of “Cantor Dust Man” was to depict the plurality of a being. The character Romanesco describes having lived several lives, and sings that a memory contains a memory which contains a memory, etc... The 3D Puzzle relief film is a sequel: the character Romanesco has aged and is looking in a memory for an object which missing from his collection. The film “Where the Ruins Grow” deals with the memory that forms identity and, as in the other productions of “Iterative Memories of Cantor Dust Man”, it is a very musical film in which I play the protagonist. We can therefore see it as an alternative episode of the series. It would be a life of Romanesco, parallel to the musical “Cantor Dust Man” and “3D Puzzle”. Romanesco has multiple lifelines and time is not so linear.

MG: However, this series does not only include films: it was born from a drawing and it generates others, as well as music. All these iterations echo and nourish each other conceptually.

SL: Absolutely. For example, I created the installation of drawings “No Place Like Home” echoing the film Where The Ruins Grow. It is composed of two large drawings in felt-tip pen and black stone, suspended back to back. On one side the right profile of a face, on the other, the left. Like a cage, this very geometric face is composed solely of edges in the colors of the skin and hair. Inside this “head cage” is a miniature prisoner. To draw these profiles of the “cage head”, I first scanned my head in three dimensions, flattened this volume in 2D to have it drawn in large size, in pencil, by a plotter (a drawing machine of the artist Nicolas Guillemin) and I finally went over this sketch with colored markers. Finally, I imprisoned the little character there, which I drew freehand with black chalk. This freedom to move from one medium to another is the foundation of cinema and video: a sum of media that become one. Exactly like saying, conversely, that an artist is a person who multiplies. I love the idea of total art but also the transmedia principle of a universe extended beyond the media.

MG: “Where the ruins are born” features a death row inmate who is granted, as a matter of ultimate compassion, one last cigarette. Where does the tragic dimension of this new project suddenly come from?

SL: Until now, my work has always been born out of melancholy and anguish. In my films, it is the internal conflicts of the characters that emerge on the image. My interest in the subject of deprivation of liberty was born quite early. My Iranian origins make me particularly sensitive to this subject. In Iran, my grandfather died in prison. My father and I cannot go to my country of origin at the risk of being locked up there for “espionage”; or other arbitrary reasons. In 2013, Monique Mabelly's testimony on the last execution in France, in 1977, was made public. In this document, the magistrate describes the final minutes, the obscene situation of this spectacle, with irresistible empathy. The condemned smokes his last cigarette and he knows that with the last puff, he will be thrown into the Beaumettes courtyard and, as Badinter said, he will be “cut in two”.

I was overwhelmed by this text and I vowed to adapt it. But I didn't feel ready. Ten years later, I exhibited at the Castelet in Toulouse and the project seemed tailor-made because before being an exhibition space, the Castelet belonged to heritage, but not the happiest: it was a former prison. So I first wrote a few versions of screenplays adapting the last minutes of the last guillotine in France, Hamida Djandoubi. Not satisfied with a literal adaptation, I spent a year researching, documenting myself on the death penalty and the daily lives of prisoners in France, the United States, Iran... So, at the same time, I wrote the script for another film project on the subject: “Clouds in a Jar”. Constrained by time and money, I wanted to formulate a simple and refined expression, which resulted in the film Where are the ruins born. I looked for what I had in common with a prisoner; to go further, what we, the people on the outside, the “innocents”, have in common with a condemned man. First there is the interiority which is opposed to the exterior, outside the walls, but also which is opposed to the persona, our surface. Above all, I viscerally felt dizzy in the face of disappearance. We entertain ourselves so as not to think about it, but obviously it is imminent, it concerns us all. I then projected myself into this situation.

MG: The relentless ringing of the clock, it’s 4 o’clock, the smoking of the cigarette, punctuate the duration of the film, materializing the countdown. This time the body is constrained after having been in your previous films split, multiplied to infinity “fractalized”, crossed. Then the film shifts into another dimension. We hear: “What will you do when you get out? ". Black. Close-up of the condemned man. White. Faced with this impossibility, do freedom and the life of inner thoughts fight against imminent death? How did you design and organize these following scenes?

SL: The film is structured in epanadiplosis, that is to say it loops on itself, it ends on the same empty shot of the chair and the clock, like a reset of the counter. At the end of the film, the place is free for the next one. It begins with an entrance to the fields, exactly like in the theater. This refers to the last minutes of those on death row in the United States. Even today, an American session takes place during the day to allow visitors to attend. So the family of the condemned and that of the victim can come. In France, from the 1940s (end of executions in public squares) to 1977, this took place in front of around ten professionals from the prison world, justice, religious personnel... In short, in front of spectators, but before rising of the sun, like a shameful thing that was hidden behind the scenes of justice, among professional people.

Still in France, during his last minutes, the condemned man's hands were tied and he was seated on a chair in front of his audience. Then came the ritual of smoking and, a French specialty, a glass of rum. In my film, the hands of the guards, which seem to hold (or support) the condemned, evoke a situation during American executions. It thus happens that guards contain the condemned while others strap him to his execution bed. In short, my film mixes French references with those of the United States to achieve a more allegorical form. Mixture, hybridity, impurity are part of my work. The American inspirations come from the fact that part of my family lives there, I studied there and I find French culture still strongly under American influence. Ultimately, we don't know what era the film is set in and we don't know the purpose of the condemnation. What remains is the human.

From the moment he smokes, the condemned person goes into his thoughts. The reminiscence of a female voice (“What will you do when you go out?”) sets off the flow. Are his thoughts a literal answer, what would he do if he could get out? Are they memories? Never mind. All imagination is only a memory adaptation, projection towards the front while relying on the front. But above all, what is outside the prison has become a virtuality for him: before, during and after.

MG: I would actually like to read you on the adequacy of interior thoughts with virtual images. How were they shaped? This feeling we have of floating between memories or dreams. You could also approach the relationship with music, which we have not yet mentioned.

SL: For the mental images of the film, I wanted places and people evoking important aspects of a life that the inmate might miss. Being outdoors, in nature or in the city; love, friends, family… For this, I captured 3D scans. I chose a 3D rendering in “wire”, which can evoke a cage of course, but also a web woven by memory. I also wanted the colors to remain on these edges, so that we always feel an immersion in a space that existed. I kept the imperfections of these 3D captures. My goal is to play on the ambiguity of these virtual spaces. In their making, they are unfinished imprints of reality. Yet, in the context of the film, they are also ruins. For example, there is an interior space where you can hear wind rushing through the “holes” in the walls. These holes are artifacts from the 3D scan. Of the trees outdoors, only trunks often remain. The room ends up disappearing, disintegrating and moving away from us into nothingness.

Concerning the music of my films, it is the emotions that guide my composition. The melody takes precedence, the rhythm follows. She has an important part in the series “Iterative Memories of Cantor Dust Man”. This is evident in the “musical” for soloist, Cantor Dust Man.

I have the impression that our relationship to melody is first and foremost cultural. For my part, I was trained in classical music, then I played drums in rock groups, sang in others and finally I carried out my solo musical project. Since my film “Puzzle”, I have produced my film scores by improvising on an instrument (piano, guitar, etc.) in front of the image. Then I fix the improvisation by replaying it, sometimes identically. Finally, I arrange if I feel the need, I add other instruments... I am therefore first of all a spectator of my montage and I express this state through music. In general, music helps me translate the character's feelings. Often it is also personified by an instrument. In Cantor Dust Man, it is the piano and its chromatic richness which echoes the multiple faces (it is an orchestral instrument in itself, it is not for nothing that it is the basis of many composers).

In Where the Ruins Grow, the guitar is the instrument that I found on the scale of the prisoner. Here, overall the music floats, it is in suspension, like the life of the condemned during this moment. In a principle of purity, I preferred it to be ethereal, full of reverberation. One note echoes the other, at the octave for example, creating a sensation of balance... This produces a paradox. We know we are facing a tragedy. However, many people sentenced to death have prepared for death and leave peacefully. And despite this, obsessive arpeggios turn on themselves like a screw that deepens where perhaps we would prefer to stay on the surface. A refrain that reminds us of reality.