The Georges Brassens park was brought out of the Parisian ground after the defacement in 1979 of what was known to be “The Vaugirard Slaughterhouse”. Ever since the inauguration of the park in 1985, the site, located in the fifteenth district of Paris, has been used for leisure activities, including the book market held every weekend under what used to be the horse hall. Nowadays, the memory of the abattoir rests in silence in some of the place’s undestroyed edifices which are situated around the site. The park is a dwelling to the juxtaposition of the past with the present, the present with the absent, the visible with the invisible. To be more precise, the present and the visible refer to the park and the people, and the absent and the invisible designate the slaughterhouse and the violence. As a reference to Denis Hollier, the site is the celebration of a gap. Indeed, the violence of the past, being the slaughtering and butchering of animals, is unknown to the crowd, or erased from the minds of people who are celebrating in the present.
My initial idea for this project was to create a sound and video-based installation, bringing to light the erasure of the Vaugirard slaughterhouse, which has been defaced by the construction of the Georges Brassens park. Because of the virus outbreak, I no longer have access to the iPads at school. Instead, I created a purely digital video-work, following the same principle of organization and structure as the primary idea.
The video’s overall composition re-enacts instants of the slaughtering process by juxtaposing sounds of the past with images of the present. The coordination of videos and sounds appearing and disappearing together creates a dynamic which allows the viewers to travel in space and time through their gaze. In addition, the video frames are organized by “scenes”, each introduced with a title and a playful music. This duality title/music emphasizes in an ironic way the lack of awareness of the people who, as mentioned above, are celebrating the gap of the slaughterhouse. The order of the scenes follows the order of steps making up the system of the Vaugirard slaughterhouse: from the arrival of the animals at the site, to the consumption of their flesh– from external to internal. Similarly, the arrangement of the video frames are based on the positions of the different filming locations on the map of the park. Quoting Guy Debord, this configuration allows the people, who are experiencing the video, to develop a psycho-geographical awareness of an absence. Finally, the color of the video footages is red, evoking the floods of blood released from the butchering of the animals.
Through this piece, the silent architecture of the park is given a voice, the violence it confines being released through sound.
