Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani
21 Jan - 18 Mar 2006
Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani
Toute la mémoire du monde
The world’s knowledge
Installation
January 21st 2006 until March 18th 2006
„There are indications of a time, when all riddles will be solved, a time, when this universe and others will provide/deliver their keys. And this is simply because their readers, who are facing a piece of universal knowledge, will bit by bit find fragments of the same secret, that has a very beautiful name and calls itself felicity.“ (in Alain Resnais movie „Toute la mémoire du monde“, 1956)
The old Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the centre of Paris is currently vacant in major parts. The 11 floors of the stockroom and a capacious reading room are left unexploited.
In 1956 this library was the setting for a movie of Alain Resnais, the director of “Hiroshima mon amour” and “Last Year in Marienbad”. In his 20 minute documentary “Toute la mémoire du monde” Alain Resnais shows how the library functions as a storehouse of the world’s knowledge; how, on an ordinary day books, magazines, plans and other treasures arrive, get catalogued and find their way into the archives, to be thus available for the reader in the reading room, who, as he says, internalises a part of the universal knowledge by reading and thus receives a “key”.
50 years later: We find the location vacated. An apocalyptic scenery. The knowledge has vanished. The pictures of the empty reading room and the empty stockroom immediately imply the loss of that “key”, the gateway to knowledge.
Analogous to the movie by Alain Resnais we filmed the location using slow tracking shots. In a double projection thousands of stocking room shelves without books flash by and in the reading room the camera merely captures a handful of young people, whiling away their time. Amongst the waiting people the withdrawal of knowledge provokes first signs of resentment, first signs of rebellion.
© Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani, exhibition view, 2006
Toute la mémoire du monde
The world’s knowledge
Installation
January 21st 2006 until March 18th 2006
„There are indications of a time, when all riddles will be solved, a time, when this universe and others will provide/deliver their keys. And this is simply because their readers, who are facing a piece of universal knowledge, will bit by bit find fragments of the same secret, that has a very beautiful name and calls itself felicity.“ (in Alain Resnais movie „Toute la mémoire du monde“, 1956)
The old Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the centre of Paris is currently vacant in major parts. The 11 floors of the stockroom and a capacious reading room are left unexploited.
In 1956 this library was the setting for a movie of Alain Resnais, the director of “Hiroshima mon amour” and “Last Year in Marienbad”. In his 20 minute documentary “Toute la mémoire du monde” Alain Resnais shows how the library functions as a storehouse of the world’s knowledge; how, on an ordinary day books, magazines, plans and other treasures arrive, get catalogued and find their way into the archives, to be thus available for the reader in the reading room, who, as he says, internalises a part of the universal knowledge by reading and thus receives a “key”.
50 years later: We find the location vacated. An apocalyptic scenery. The knowledge has vanished. The pictures of the empty reading room and the empty stockroom immediately imply the loss of that “key”, the gateway to knowledge.
Analogous to the movie by Alain Resnais we filmed the location using slow tracking shots. In a double projection thousands of stocking room shelves without books flash by and in the reading room the camera merely captures a handful of young people, whiling away their time. Amongst the waiting people the withdrawal of knowledge provokes first signs of resentment, first signs of rebellion.
© Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani, exhibition view, 2006