FORGET

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2006-2009, 00:03:17

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Architecture, Town planning, Allegory, Memory

Summary :
When many of the theories, economic systems and ideologies from which the world was built are now in crisis, one must ask what should be preserved, and what should be forgotten? Buildings – as the physical manifestation of societal values and aspirations – embody this question. From the tallest high rises to the most humble dwellings, these structures live as the evidence of actions, and tombstones to those which have been erased. In a seemingly endless cycle of being razed and rebuilt (often as the consequence of war), Fatmi argues that – in human and economic cost – “If you want to forget, it is free…If you want to remember, that can prove expensive…” The video Forget lingers somewhere between these poles, looping historical black & white footage of paired Melchorre buildings being toppled by controlled detonation. They collapse with little fanfare, providing an inglorious end to structures built hurriedly in 1960s France to house immigrant workers as the country’s first sons were engaged in war. These buildings were ghettos for faceless workers to inhabit; yet despite their middling status and architectural failings, the Melchorre became the foundation of a community outside popular attention, and outside modernism’s dream. As a last, but ostensibly perpetual respite, Fatmi prolongs their fleeting memory by forwarding and reversing the footage – having the Melchorre rise and fall to the sound of a beeping heart rate monitor. Beating faintly but steadily in an infinite state of life, “They seem,” in the words of the artist, “to breathe, to resist the destruction, the loss, the memory. They are becoming monuments…” They are human, and in a pock-faced park adjacent to a hospital (with clear visual association to the World Trade Center towers), Forget compels us to remember the enduring link between being/s and building/s. Steven Matijcio

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