Outside and In‐Between: Representation and Spatial Production in Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster’s Urban Imagery

Abstract

The photography and filmmaking of Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster (b. 1965) depict derelict zones and dedicated spaces of social interaction in the built environment as intervals of stasis, anticipation, and vacancy. Questioning the physical cohesiveness of the postcolonial, globalized city, Gonzalez‐Foerster employs techniques of surveillance, social research, travelogue, and destination marketing. This article considers her representations of social space and subjective experience by examining her collection of films, Parc Central (2006), and book of photographs, Alphavilles? (2004). While the films often highlight monuments and landmarks as estranged, overdetermined places of expectation and transition, her photographs emphasize peripheral spaces as interchangeable signs in the visual lexicon of urban development. Drawing on the theories of D. W. Winnicott, Henri Lefebvre, and others, this article frames these choices as a negotiation of the limits of constructing representations of the urban experience in the face of the city’s growing homogenization and fragmentation across physical and virtual terrains.

Keywords:

• Photography
• Film
• Modernism
• Monument
• Postcolonialism
• Urban Development
• Lefebvre, Henri (1901–1991)
• Winnicott, D. W. (1896–1971)

Notes

1 Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, “Introduction,” in Alphavilles?, ed. Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2004), n.p.

2 Some examples would be Double Terrain de Jeu (Pavillon‐Marquise), a 2006 temporary alteration to Oscar Niemeyer’s Ibirapuera Park structures for the 27th São Paulo Biennial in 2006, the outdoor installations Parc‐Plan d’évasion for Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002, and Roman de Münster for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2007, and the futuristic disaster shelter of TH.2058 in the Unilever Series at the Tate Modern in London in 2008.

3 Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster and Jens Hoffmann, eds., Tropicale Modernité (Geneva: JRP/Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 1999); Centre Georges Pompidou, Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, Exotourisme, Paris, 25 October–16 December 2002; Gonzalez‐Foerster, ed., Alphavilles?; Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster and Moritz Küng, eds., Tropicalisation! (Zurich: JRP/Ringier/deSingel International Arts Center, 2006); Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, ed., Expodrome: Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster & Cie, (Paris: Paris Musées, 2007).

4 For example, tropicalisation refers to the process of adapting working methods and structures developed in temperate zones for use in tropical climates. See Andre Delrieu, La Tropicalisation: comment protéger vos matériels et installations dans les pays tropicaux (Paris: Desforges, 1974).

5 Stéphanie Moisdon Trembley, Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster (Paris: Hazan, 2002), 8.

6 See Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 5.

7 John Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xi–xii.

8 David Harvey, “Contested Cities: Social Process and Spatial Form,” in Transforming Cities: Contested Governance and New Spatial Divisions, ed. Nick Jewson and Susanne MacGregor (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 19–27, 23.

9 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), 110.

10 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 100.

11 Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster and Jacques Rancière, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: l’espace des possibles,” Art Press, no. 327 (2006): 29–35, 31.

12 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland, (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002).

13 For example, the Kyoto riverbank in Riyo (1999) and Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach in Plages (2001).

14 Gonzalez‐Foerster and Rancière, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: l’espace des possibles,” 31.

15 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson‐Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 129.

16 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 125.

17 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 142.

18 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 143.

19 Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real‐and‐Imagined Places (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 60–61.

20 Their collaborations have included “No Ghost Just a Shell,” a project begun by Huyghe and Parreno in 1999 (http://www.noghostjustashell.com/; accessed 23 November 2009) and have resulted in the exhibition Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 30 October 1998–10 January 1999 and Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, 6 October–12 November 2000.

21 Damien Sausset, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: mon atelier, c’est la ville,” Connaissance des arts, no. 598 (2002): 55. “Je passais beaucoup de temps dans l’espace, jusqu’au moment où les éléments s’imposaient dans mon esprit. J’allais ensuite dans les magasins et je regardais les choses. C’était aussi une façon de voir les villes, de découvrir de nouveaux territoires, avec l’alibi de chercher une chaise, un tissu….” (Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.)

22 As Dorothea van Hantelmann explains, these installations of carefully arranged furniture and everyday objects are “charged with an insinuated personal or narrative dimension that nonetheless never becomes concrete.… Instead, each room is like an open text where parts seem to be missing.” Dorothea van Hantelmann, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: Back to the Future” in theanyspacewhatever, ed. Nancy Spector (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2008), 59.

23 Catherine Francblin cites Gonzalez‐Foerster’s 1996 installation Une chambre en ville (A Room in the City) as the pivotal work in her shift from focusing on the domestic interior to the urban exterior. With its inclusion of a TV running urban images and a radio tuned to a local station, Francblin notes that the city’s “hinted presence seeped into every feature of this room….” See Catherine Francblin, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: If the Future is Now,” Art Press, no. 267 (2001): 31.

24 The subtitles Gonzalez‐Foerster includes with shots of these and other locations often invoke these references precisely to introduce a psychological space that acknowledges the considerable narrative differences between such films and her productions, despite a moment of geographical and perhaps visual proximity.

25 Francblin, “Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster: If the Future is Now,” 33.

26 Moisdon Trembley, Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 9.

27 Philippe Rahm, “Au présent,” in Expodrome: Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster & Cie, ed. Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 60. “[L]eur vrai sujet, leurs acteurs, ce sont les spectateurs eux‐mêmes, qui se retrouvent à errer dans le présent d’une ville.”

28 http://www.dgf5.com/ (accessed 20 January 2008). “C’est peut‐être aussi une confusion voulue entre spectateur et tourisme, entre attraction et exposition, entre espace et image.”

29 Moisdon Trembley, Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 17.

30 Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, ed., Films (Dijon: Les presses du réel/Portikus, 2003), 23.

31 For information on the Palais de Chaillot and its role at the Exposition Internationale, see James D. Herbert, “The View of the Trocadéro: The Real Subject of the Exposition Internationale, Paris, 1937,” Assemblage, no. 26 (1995): 94–112.

32 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 312.

33 Jean‐Pierre Rehm, “Cinema Is No Safety Zone,” in Films, ed. Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 5–9, 6–7.

34 The exhibition ran from 19 October to 19 December 2004. The Alphavilles? project had been part of Gonzalez‐Foerster’s earlier exhibition, Multiverse, at the Kunsthalle in Zurich, from 12 June to 15 August 2004.

35 One might cite the work of artists Ed Ruscha, Eleanor Antin, and Douglas Huebler.

36 Ironically, the book’s few photographs of easily recognizable landmarks—Hiroshima’s A‐Bomb Dome or Coney Island’s rollercoaster—lose their iconic authority in such a schema, becoming reinvested as material presences outside the expected symbolic register.

37 Lisette Lagnado, “Couche atmosphérique,” in Expodrome: Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster & Cie, ed. Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 80–94, 83. “[U]n manifeste en faveur des bordures (de la modernité, de l’urbanisme, des langues).”

38 Gonzalez‐Foerster, “Introduction,” in Alphavilles?, n.p. See also http://www.alphaville.com.br/ (accessed 5 January 2009).

39 This process recalls the Situationist International tactic of détournement as exercised by Guy Debord, whose Guide psychogéographique de Paris (1957) amounted to a rearrangement of the French capital’s map into a new system of signs of circulation.

40 Moisdon Trembley, Dominique Gonzalez‐Foerster, 8.

41 Friedmann, The Prospect of Cities, xi–xii.