PIERRE HUYGHE: As I start a project, I always need to create a world.
Then I want to enter this world
and my walk through this world is the work.
What take me a long time is to create the world.
Celebration Park at the Tate is a collection of exhibition.
The set of very singular experience.
What people can think if they enter the Tate and they see, “I do not own Snow White.”
Everyone who saw Snow White owns Snow White.
Of course.
You need to play with this culture in order to be part of it.
I think someone who see I do not own Snow White,
he understand that maybe he can start to play with it.
It’s about the circulation of stories.
It’s about how we can tell story to each other and how this is really fluid
or how this is not so much fluid.
That’s why there is these doors moving in this room, the threshold,
you say that you are inside something
or you are outside something.
If the threshold is moving, the doors are moving,
there is no more threshold.
There is no more inside and outside.
It is definitely about boundaries.
About culture and boundaries.
These neons and these doors are in a certain way linked.
Somewhere should exist an island.
I heard, it’s a rumor, I read,
I met people and they say there is this white creature on this island.
I’m actually now taking a boat across the
Drake Channel to find out if this is true or it is not true.
To find this territory and this creature.
I’m filming the actual journey and I’m filming an equivalence,
a kind of translation of this journey in the form of an opera in Central Park.
(MUSIC)
I asked the composer to take the shape of this island.
(MUSIC)
And transform the shape into a musical score for a symphonic orchestra.
(MUSIC)
So he’s playing the mountain, he’s playing the island.
The space is transformed into time.
We have walk on the moon, we have walk in the snow of the Antarctic,
we have conquest the world, so you have to have a certain distance,
let people know that you know and they know.
So then another play can start.
The other play is that now we don’t know if I went there.
We don’t know if I uh saw this island, if I uh saw this white creature,
maybe I did, maybe it’s a special effect,
people don’t know.
What is important for me is to create holes in the map.
Put white on the map.
By doing so you bring back some myth, create zone of non-knowledge.
Blur certitude.
I’m trying to be less narrative, more an emotional landscape
that I’m trying to reach here.
I want people to experience more an emotion than to experience just a simple narration.
I was invited to do something on the building of Le Corbusier,
the only building he built in North America.
This building is part of the Harvard Campus,
it’s an art center and it’s also an art department.
I start to have some problem with the commission,
I don’t know what to do and finally I find a book on how the…
Le Corbusier had some problem to do himself his commission.
I decide I’m going to do a play, kind of a satire,
an ironic parable of the two situation.
(MUSIC)
It’s nonverbal, music is from Xénakis and Varèse
who collaborate with Le Corbusier at one point.
(MUSIC)
There is the curator who invite me actually to do this project.
And then of course you have Le Corbusier and the people who
commission Le Corbusier so there’s a perfect symmetry.
You have this black figure who look like a prey mantis, Darth Vader,
who is the Dean of the Dean, the institution.
(Bird Chirping)
(Wings Flapping)
There’s this little red bird which come from an
anecdote that Le Corbusier wrote.
He was dreaming that birds will bring some seeds on his building
and the seed will grow.
The theater has been built in collaboration with this architect.
The idea was to build something between the roots and a tumor,
something that you feel will grow as a tumor from the building
and within this tumor you will have the play.
(SONG)
There is something irreverent that I’m trying to embody in a certain way.
I always thought humor was a way to broke the rule of power.
(SONG)
When it come to the transcendental beauty of the work,
even the poetic of the work, even the critical level of the work,
I think humor is really important to break even the possibility of critical judgment.
To be above that.
And I think what’s a language that is very imagist.
I really like the speed of humor.
I’m not interest about filming the reality as it is given.
And I’m not interest about building fiction.
What I’m interest in is to set up the reality,
to produce a reality, and then only then document this reality.
I did for example the celebration north of New York,
Streamside is a little town under construction.
I’m looking for what all these people have in common
and I find something very basic which is they all meet the nature,
which is this place that I’ve found.
And on that very, very simple base, I invent a script program and I film that.
What you have here is a reenactment of the beginning of Bambi,
the idea of a pure, ideal nature and what you have is this deer getting
from this nature to this new town.
This deer go from something which has a certain complexity,
the nature to this kind of white cube,
and then the film start again
and now you see a little girl at her home and then
she’s just going to travel from her old home to her new home.
So it’s exactly the same movement.
Once is by the animal, once is by human.
That is the base of this tradition.
This celebration, this custom.
What you see in the second part of the film is the actual celebration, the celebrate that..
I organize a whole celebration
from the parade to the concert to the food to the mayor, uh…
and in a girl’s speech to the kids playing to everything.
MAN: Testing…
HUYGHE: In a certain way, it’s a script.
It’s a recipe.
WOMAN: Good afternoon everyone.
My name is…
HUYGHE: It’s a score.
The score can be play again.
Next year at the same time on October 11, just take this sheet of paper
and you say parade and you say and park, and the day and fold.
For me, the most important thing, this idea that you can set up this performance
because it’s in the loop of the year, you will just come back and come back and
come back.
That’s what I’m interests me to produce a time,
the duration that will just come back in time.
(SONG)
I’m building a kind of mythology.
(SONG)
Then people play this mythology in the form of a party which we call celebration,
one time a year, we have a score, and then you have an interpretation.
My works since ’94 has always been about this
time-based protocol, time-based work.
It has always been about the exhibition itself, the exhibition being a starting point.
Usually an artist think an exhibition as an endpoint,
a resolution of something.
He’s working in his studio and then there’s a process,
at the end of this process he’s presenting his work
in what we call an exhibition.
I’m not interest about that.
I’m interest that the exhibition is not the end of a process,
but is the starting point to go somewhere else.