Photographs – Biography – Written texts
Exhibition nés
Exhibition une heure
Exhibition détenus
Exhibition noir silence
Une heure

August 28 - October 4, 2003

Dufftown n°6
video 2002, 60 minutes
In the summer 2002, Philippe Bazin was invited to Scotland in the Highlands as a guest artist in residence by William Grant & sons Distillers. The exhibition in Galerie Anne Barrault proposes to show the various aspects of the work achieved at that time.
The company, nestled in the heart of a valley, has business relations all over the world. However, its workers are the inhabitants of a small village. Wishing to go on with his questioning on the workers’faces he had started some time before, Philippe Bazin video filmed eight employees of the firm, an hour static shot. Each of them stares at the camera, without moving or speaking. The films are silent. The faces are filmed in close-up.Those people performed a true feat , keeping their dignity and their reserve for the whole hour.
These people belong to a physical ,politico-historic , even literary background . That is why these eight video films are shown along with the photographs of landscapes of wild northwest Scotland (Western Landscapes), but also of landscapes of battles which are component of the Scottish national feeling (Battle Landscapes), while for an hour, the video projection of a seascape of Skye takes place. A sound track can be listened to on headphones, the reading by Philippe Bazin of all the lines of Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play, recalling a historical character who became a king,, some miles from the firm.
So we have a real microcosm displayed in this work “ ONE HOUR ”, a microcosm of which the firm eight workers are the figureheads, the anonymous, silent supernumeraries, at the same time the examples of a strong relationship with the wild countryside,but also belonging to a deep politico-historic and economic genealogy , not without literary forgeries.
Dumb faces facing the power of the firm, the heir of nineteenth century capitalism, facing the History of Scotland and the literature which alters it . There we have Philippe Bazin’s world which from the very beginning has been his artistic project :his relationship with institutions (political, economic, historical aspects), with the faces of those(human and universal aspects) who are immersed in them. The landscape in the same way as the human face is viewed , not in its romantic aspect, but in its political one, which is something new in this artistic project.