Matthias Odin:

Ile-de-France (Iéna Situation #4)

Pauline Perplexe

Arceuil, France

A community that would have renounced at last to search for the star above its head. île-de-france is the critic of the weight of a necessary administration. The weight of hours spent waiting, bodies reunited by spaces and circumstances, but without warmth. To place something in a white cube, always reenacts the violence of museumification. This seems suitable considering the ‘sacred’ character of artworks. However one must ask oneself in this case what makes them lose the crucial aspect of their sacredness – that is to say their viability as merchandise – to rediscover joy.

[…]

One doesn’t go back to childhood, no more than they return to the island. The space in which we are, doesn’t only appear to be the reconstitution of an island. It is the redistribution of the island itself: the atomization of its structures (earth, roads, buildings, hydrography…) in which it wraps and contracts itself entirely; both metonymically (it is each of its own fragments) and metaphorically (it is the movement, the dis-location that triggers its separation from the continent and frees it from its topological anchorage). Wandering island, moving, uncertain. Contrapuntal island undocked from its port, arch swayed into the sea like a drunken raft that only stops its path at slack tide. As a matter of fact, The Île-de-France is the reason for this displacement whose final restoration affirms it will render the things of this earth their original state and inaugurate a new kind of harmony from within the chaos.

[…]

On your last legs, when the air becomes scarce for the benefit of 5G cell waves, when all the profane is determined by the sign of depth, the possibility of an ultimate hesitation nevertheless presents itself before certain implications of irony. In this other island, that contains others, still, us, islanders, we create archipelagos, but we do not conserve them. What we create is encumbered by others, for the interest of others, states and institutions, that reserve the right to make maps we are the only one’s to discover. We do not own the island – it owns us.