Video projection, 56’ loop, 2002

The worn chairs of the civil servants of the Québéc government are gathered randomly in the warehouse of the Association of deaf and dumb persons on Henri-Bourassa St. in Montreal. They express an empty presence, an abyss in their tattered remains. Torn or disheveled, as a group, they occupy space in silence. The chairs, excluded from their presupposed social function, are engaged in the margins of this deaf space - overcoming their impossibility of communicating.
The video Red Monochrome, is an installation joining together two animations – one in projection and one on monitor. In the first video, projected on the back wall, the red chairs invade the space by pushing the various chairs out of the way, gradually taking up their positions.
In this play of positioning, the red chairs engage in a fight to appropriate the territory, but the last pink chair resists and tries to keep its position before being thrown out by the reds.  Furthermore, the amassed reds, form a self-organised monochrome group, where the final arrangement is reminiscent of a military parade.
The second video is presented on a monitor in a withdrawn position on the ground in front of the projection. It presents a pink chair giving a ‘spinning’ performance in the middle of the red chairs. If the different chair had been formerly excluded, based on differentiation, which is a monochromatic one, here its difference acts as an attractor for the mass of undifferentiated red chairs which passively contemplate its solitary spectacle.

Acknowledgments