Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

 

In this photo, you can see the Butterfly Pavilion, which is only one of the elements of the Documenta project Park–A Plan for Escape. The pavilion is designed for video retroprojection. The large window is in fact a screen, and the shape of the pavilion is made according to this idea of projection—an optical- device construction that inserts a fragment of an animated or moving image into a real landscape. This work was made specifically for Documenta. It is based on many years of traveling, but it crystallized in September 2001 in a park in Istanbul. At that point, I proposed the project and went to Kassel to look for the green space where it could take place.

In a way, the piece is connected to a series of 35-mm short films I shot in outdoor situations—such as the Kamo River in Kyoto, the Kowloon Star ferry terminal in Hong Kong, and Copacabana beach in Rio— which explored specific moments and relations to space in these locations. It is also connected to "Tropical Modernity," a proposal made in 1999 for the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona, which explored the unconscious and potential space opened between modernity and tropicality. One of the challenges involved in bringing the piece to Documenta is contained in the title itself: A Plan for Escape. Escape from what? Told as a kind of joke, from the white cube to the black box to the green space....