Par Hasard

“The past has not disappeared but has been turned into zillions of tourist attractions. We, the tourists, try to get close to the roots of our civilization, to our own origins, by visiting and looking at packaged versions of the past.”

Par Hasard depicts the Eiffel Tower as a wonder and a spectacle, a piece of engineering that exists in between past and future and offers visitors an escape from their everyday environment. The video opens with the audio-visual Morse code dialog between two Eiffel Towers:“Non, le passé est fantastique!” and “Non, l'avenir est fantastique!”. Reflected in the absence of a straight plot-driven narrative, polemic between opposing meanings, emotions and times continues throughout the video in similarly ambiguous manner, primarily via cutaway shots. Sequences in the video are shifting between the wide shots of the stroboscopic-lit tower at night and the tracking shots from within the tower’s structure during the daytime. The soundtrack is comprised of sounds recorded in situ combined with manipulated audio fragments sampled from French avant-garde cinema.