Marie-José Burki – DE NOS JOURS

Marie-José Burki,
« De nos jours »

Through the rigorous and simple devices of her videos, Marie José Burki tries to catch “moments, which allow to glimpse time as duration and to give back the experiment to the audience”. In connection with reality, the artist rejects all directing or narrative and goes on by improvisation and sampling, adding sometimes pieces of texts or conversations to her footages. Her films indefatigably show territories and duration of the human existence, but also of the animal, very present in her work. These are people who live along the Hudson River, birds in cage, prostitutes in a showcase, guests around a table: such presences facing time passing by and moving. De nos jours (2003) is the first of a video series developed between 2003 and 2007 where parts of life are spending on expectations, secrets and regrets.

The movie camera slowly and silently films anonymous enjoying park lawns on a beautiful sunny day. People discuss, read, nap, smoke and picnic. The audience strongly perceives the presence of time in this moving fresco and experiments the quotation of Paul de Tarse, “the world we see is passing”. A long grassroots travelling catches bodies or part of them, sometimes very closely or farther. With this way, the movie gathers intimacy and social in a place both solitary and inhabited. Projected side by side on a wall, the three videos have a different duration, giving images associations and new rhythms. Through this, bodies and groups seem to reconstruct or to undo. This associative device is intensified by the installation of some plates put against the projection wall where images appear as striped and detached. The three movies of De nos jours make a reminiscent tape of the cinemascope format. But here, despite the big depth of field, the frame does not have neither sky nor big spaces, but focuses on human. The video documents an outdoor relaxation moment, a slice of “instrumentalized free time”, shows what we do when we are doing nothing. This heavenly vision of a bucolic afternoon, at first peaceful, is shaded by a mass of comestible products and rubbishes around the hedonists. Among consumer goods, medias titles mention September 11, Irak war or the murder of an actress, expressing violence, slowly joining these carefreeness places.

Marie José Burki De nos jours
[2003, video installation, without sound, colour, respective durations: 13’32”, 11’56”, 10’29”, approx. 1600 x 300cm, thermal insulation plates]