Project: Le siège du Parti communiste français (PCF HQ)

Method: Days of Action

Work: Revolution (Politics of Motion)

Collaborators: Sophie Warren & Jonathan Mosley, 2016

Film credits: Camera and editing - Warren and Mosley; Sound courtesy of PCF archive

Duration: 8 minute loop with sound duration: 50:32 minutes.
Credits: Documentation of location courtesy of SICC

'Revolution' and 'Uprising' explore a physical solidarity between the body and the architecture of le siège du Parti communiste français (PCF HQ). It is as if the architectural motifs of this political party headquarters building have a power or a latent force of their own, inciting bodily postures and movement.

Revolution and uprising are political terms indebted to the language of movement. Both originate from descriptions of physical displacement and describe a social body in the act of pursuing a collective goal. In ‘Revolution’ the social body is now inscribed into the body of the artist who enacts the formal motion of revolution, spinning back and forth within the curvilinear corridor on the first floor underground. Or within ‘Uprising’, is captured on the point of an unseen but imagined movement. The works are a nod to Slavoj Zizek’s notion of suspended revolution, one that holds all the potential of utopia without the “morning after” effect. This revolutionary endeavour will never lose its energy and the promise of uprising remains poised with all its potential intact.

The movement in 'Revolution' is juxtaposed with a soundtrack in French of communist politician and writer Louis Aragon addressing the 13th Congress of the French Communist Party in 1954 on an ‘Art of the Party’. The central argument of Aragon’s speech is that French communist art must emancipate from Soviet Socialist Realism and develop a national perspective. He urges that artists should employ form and content to arouse in the viewer both sympathy and action.