Auditorium

Auditorium was originally conceived and executed as a site specific installation, made for the exhibition ‘Les Merveilles du Monde’ at the Musée National de Beaux Arts de la Ville de Dunkerque. The Musée is a 1960’s Modernist edifice of concrete and glass, the interior of which has not been altered since its construction, featuring aerodynamic concrete staircases and miles of louvered blinds. The auditorium is also intact and beautiful with dark chocolate coloured sound proofed walls and rows of sticky caramel Eames style bucket seats. This sensual interior is the set for the film and the set for the performance of watching the film, a performance created by the viewer.The sound of the slide projector that punctuates the edit emphasises both the artifical the stillness of the images that establish the ‘set’ and define the limits and function of the real space. These apparently still images of the interior décor; the discussion table on the small stage, the speakers and lighting fixtures, the microphone waiting for a voice, the inert, expectant, empty seats seen from the front of the room, are interrupted by the appearance of a walking figure. The sound of the slides changing serves to insert new images, and characters, without introduction, into the set. | The primary character, a tanned young woman in tennis gear, hallucinates a host of others into the room; other audience members perhaps, although when the camera pans to take in the room she is seen to be alone. The characters could be co-existent but they could equally be each other’s fantasies, or ghosts who mutually inhabit the space if not the time of the auditorium. A scantily clad black woman with a voluptuous figure sits on the discussion table in the front, triggering a variety of subtly erotic actions from her audience. Gestures and glances often exchanged flirtatiously in the restrained conditions of a lecture theatre, museum or library are here an echo of the décor itself. The black woman’s performance pays only a perfunctory ‘ass-service’ to the ‘exotic sexual object’, she has her back to the audience and retains a rather oblique power, she personifies the sexual charge in the still air and it is the audience members who perform in response to her presence, a choreography of whispers and gestures. They have been brought into the space by the space itself.The film as installed in Dunkerque was a series of frames within frames, heightening the viewer’s awareness of the relationship between audience and performance. Because it represents the space that the viewer was sitting in, the viewing experience itself fell into a mise en abyme. When it is shown elsewhere the Auditorium becomes a fantasy of these relations.