l’Obstruction

Extract from L’Obstruction. Video HD 26.03 min

The artistic film L’Obstruction centers around a character who constantly finds himself in situations of verbal and physical blockage. L’Obstruction addresses the impossibility of critical public speech and the subsequent anxiety it generates. The struggle with language and meaning is experienced by the character in the film – stuck between a strong intent and a delivery of mumbles and sentences – brings his sweating body and emotional state to an absurd point of crisis, pointing with a biting humour to the affects conveyed by the current neoliberal context. The bodies of the silent listeners join the city’s overwhelmingly desirable and literally hot presence. Their gazes, whether apathetic, intense or mocking (depending on our level of paranoia), add to the increasing temperature obstructing the speaker’s ability to touch the audience and deliver what he refers to as an important educational discourse. Trying to make sense, he holds on to a broken speech navigating anecdotes about worker conditions and comments on economy, supply and demand, desire and politics. Sex plays as a metaphor of the disruption: directly, through the unavoidable and comical presence of the monuments’ curves, their genitals carved in stone, the oversized calf from a copy of the infamous ‘David’ (that the character comes close to hugging), but also through the surrounding pulse of the city that parasitize thoughts with excitement, urges, images, and power.

This exhibition and new commission of the film at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhague was curated by Céline Kopp, director and curator of Triangle France, in dialogue with Iben Elmstrøm.

Text by Celine Kopp