From… to Logical Revolt

—– down with — down with the military regime!!! —–
—– down with — down with the military regime!!! —–
—– down with — down with the military regime!!! —–

Cairo. The crowd.
Preparation for an anti-colonialist revolt.
As if shouting at the top of your lungs had ever made a difference.
No, that’s for sure, but at least that unleashes passions, like the burning need for freedom.

How can I put it to you?… Let’s say you’re on a beach, it’s hot out, you’re bored out of your fucking mind… You’re there like a jerk, on the sand, so you decide to build a castle. You dig on one side in order to build up on the other. And while you’re making holes here and there, building up the foundations of a faux and fleeting residence, all of a sudden, you come across a shell, a block of limestone among the fine grains of silicate… You blow on it once and then put it aside. And you fall to work again. Except that – surprise – there’s a second shell! Driven by curiosity, little by little you pull away from your architectural aspirations and reinvent yourself as an archeologist. And the more your dig, the more you find interesting stuff, just for you. Cheap tacky treasures buried right there waiting for someone (you) to find them. Out of a sense of respect, and especially feeling the excitement, you dig ever deeper, you scratch the moist sand and clear away tons and tons of grains of sand, you ferret about and nose around so far and so thoroughly that you end up getting lost yourself in the hole you’ve dug for yourself. At times you feel that something’s holding you back, a voice in your head advises you to stop – your conscience, that bitch – that you ought to halt everything now, while there’s still time. Put an end to the madness, yes, but caught up in your feverish drive, you can’t help but continue to dig. And you end up touching the thing that you oughtn’t na, you stick your finger in it and – boom! It’s collapse city. Caught in the quicksand trap, like Alice in the white rabbit’s burrow. You start to sink and the sand, little by little, covers you completely. You come toppling down tirelessly. In your plunge, you lose all those artifacts you’d accumulated over time. You lose yourself, your identity, as you see the light of day dimming, disappearing, growing faint. The trap closes around you and you end up becoming one of your relics, the ones you had all the same taken the trouble to put aside, those buggers. Soon you end up being nothing more than one of them, lost in the simulation of your own past, the hourglass. Lost in the limbo of a strange world where almost nothing seems to have a meaning anymore, you begin to find other answers to your questions. Perhaps what you really came looking for. That’s when, suffocating in the mists of your own memories, you begin to find yourself. You.

During the evening event 3-8 is pleased to offer a screening of Révoltes Logiques (Logical Revolts), Louis Henderson’s 2012 graduation film project for his degree from Le Fresnoy (Studio national des arts contemporains).

Taking as his starting point the discovery of the scenario for a film that was never shot, written by the UN in the 1950s and dealing with the Suez Crisis, Henderson went to the Egypt of today. The filmmaker decided to observe, like an archeologist, the changes occurring in a country, what has disappeared yet remains present in our memory. Révoltes Logiques builds a reflection around the notion of the image, tourist image, postcard, images that are missing; the film conjures up the ghosts of a past that no longer exists yet remains alive.

Clément Gagliano