Questions was supported by a commission awarded to selected photographers by La Samaritaine in Paris, France. Photographers were chosen by Christian Caujolle, an independant French curator and writer based between Cambodia and France. I was given an open brief "carte blance" to make work on location on the building site of La Samaritaine. This new work photographed during the summer 2017 and 2018. It returns to a process embodied in my documentary practice infused with playful fantasy and surrealism. Documentary is understood as an expanded field that addresses notions of evidence and reality by using a strategy of poetics in combination of image and text. The photographs are taken with a large format digital back and transformed into solarised "work theatres" on a building site. La Samaritaine building site is now under construction and is presently being transformed into smaller retail shops and luxury flats by the Japanese Agency Saana. The building is financed by the LVMH group that now owns La Samaritaine and Pucci as one of its luxury houses. The photographs are accompanied by lines from Brecht's poem: Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935) each stanza accompanying an image of the builders' work sites. Each stanza becomes a caption of the image. These photographs record and document a labour in progress, yet the construction workers have exited and the building is built as is by magic. The actual physical labour is here embedded in a process of reification which creates an effect so well described by Guy Debord (Society of the Spectacle, 1967): "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images'. The images here distorted in colour evoke the retail shops and designer goods valued over and beyond material labour.
Who Built the Seven Gates of Thebes?
In Books You will Read the Names of Kings
Was it the Kings that Dragged the Stones into Place?
And Babylon, so often Destroyed, who Rebuilt it so many Times?
In Which of the Houses of Gold Gleaming Lima did the Construction Workers Live?
Where, on that Evening when the Chinese Wall was Finished, did the Masons go?
The Great City of Rome is Full of Triumphal Arches. Who set Them up?
Over Whom did the Caesars Triumph?
Did Byzantium so much Praised in Song, have only Palaces for its Inhabitants?
Even in Fabled Atlantis
That Night when the Ocean Engulfed It
The Drowning Roared Out for Their Slaves
Young Alexander Conquered India
Was He Alone?
Caesar Defeated the Gauls
Did He not Have so much as a Cook with Him?
Philip of Spain Wept when His Armada went Down.
Did No One Else Weep?
Frederick the Second was Victorious in the Seven Years’ War. Who Else Prevailed?
On Every Page a Victory
Who Cooked the Victory Banquet?
Every Ten Years a Great Man. Who Paid the Bills?
So many Reports
So many Questions