Moving Image: 8 minute loop.
Sound: Played on headphones - 50:32 minutes.
Camera and editing: Warren and Mosley
Location: The French Communist Party Headquarters, Paris.
Images courtesy of Societe Immobiliere du Carrefour Chateaudun (SICC).
‘Revolution Between Two Points’ was made whilst the artists were in residence at the French Communist Party HQ in Paris in 2016, an iconic Oscar Niemeyer designed building built between 1967-1980. The action plays on the ‘politics of motion’ - how political terms are indebted to the language of movement. The artist enacts the formal motion of revolution as she spins back and forth within the curved corridor of the communist party headquarters. The movement 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. This national art of the Party must act as the cement that binds all strata of the nation around the working class. Aragon argues that a painting depicting a strike is not important because of the strike it represents, but because of the sympathy for the strikers its form can generate among viewers. Artists should therefore employ form and content to promote sympathy, and potentially action, from the viewer.
