The Blue Hour

A kind of twilight, The Blue Hour provides the eponymous performance of Georg Keller (Zug/CH, 1980) with its metaphorical context. Creating three distinct figures, Keller elaborates a critique of the gamble that is the economy. A quick and sharp street vendor, aware that he is working illegally, does business out of sight of a department store salesperson, mechanically greeting potential customers. Representational roles, the comforting illusion of doing one’s job well, the dissolution of identities, the unconscious disconnection from oneself in favor of an insidious system, alternative questions in terms of spending in a society that is betting on consumption – these are some aspects that are highlighted and clarified by the iteration of what the figures are doing. To this double and empty perpetuity comes the intervention of a third protagonist, who loudly recites a text by Charles Fournier (Besançon, 1772 - Paris, 1837), as if he were at a Speaker’s Corner in London. Published in 1845 in La Phalange*, the text is on bankruptcy.

For Keller, this new project is more along the lines of an experiment for the stage. Referencing Italian films of the 1960s while playing with the simultaneity of disparate scenes, the piece allows the artist to reconcile two opposite poles of the economy through the conflict generated by the need for attention that we all demand.