TH.2058 Events

sorry for the long period of inactivity, I was taking in nothing but ski-culture for a week in Austria. Back in town now and need to catch up now.

I basically spent a week at Tate Modern in March because of the series of events connected to the TH.2058 exhibiton that I'm doing my dissertation on. There was an artist's talk and three days of screenings of her films as well as films that were relevant for her work or somehow connected to it. It was called: Memories of a Certain Time: Films for TH.2058
I liked several of the films very much, and am very glad that I had the chance to see such landmark films like Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) and Un homme Qui Dort by Georges Perec and Bernard Queysanne (1974) as well as see Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's films.

My favourite was Alain Resnais Toute la mémoire du monde which was just wonderful and a kind of tongue-in-cheek story about humankinds attempt to categorize and systemize everything. But archiving the world's knowledge makes the National Library a museum-like tomb.

Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World's Memory), Alain Resnais, 1956, 35mm, 20 min

A grand tour of the vast processes of classification, documentation and preservation in Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, Resnais's Toute la Mémoire du Monde pursues humanity's fragile and absurd attempt to verify knowledge as a concrete, historical form. Within the corridors, tombs, offices and shelves of the library, each book, periodical, object and oddity becomes part of a huge catalogue, split and split again into groupings and compartments, laws and lists. Expanding with each year this museum of words and images populated and administered by scholars and the industrious staff, aims at the ultimate dissolution of mystery by the conservation of all memories. However within these ever-increasing mounds of material, there is only ever less certainty as the promise of some ultimate truth becomes ever more entangled in the particularities of each number, shelf and page.

The video of the conversation between Pablo Leon de la Barra and Dominique Gonazalez-Foerster and that took place in Tate Modern on the 12th of March is uploaded now and can be seen
Artist's Talk - Dominique Gonazalez-Foerster:
www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/dominique_gonzalez_foerster/default.jsp
It helps to decode her work and get a better insight into what she thinks and wants to say with it. And just generally a very interesting discussion.



Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Pablo Leon de la Barra will talk among other things about home cinemas, moments ginzas, tropical modernities, super tropicalisations, oasis of utopias, plans for escapes, dystopian architectures, turbinas futuristas...

Thursday 12 March 2009, 18.30–20.00
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium