For their first gallery solo exhibition, the artist duo Becquemin & Sagot will take over the Parisian H Gallery with “Road-Movie Cruise - Until The End Of The World #forever”, the third instalment of a trilogy focusing on “the tourist and culture industries, their excessive expansion and their impact on the environment”. For this project based on a video-performance piece, the artists boarded the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas. Built in 2010, the ship accommodates more than 6,000 passengers and over 2,000 members of staff; at 361.8m long by 66m wide, 525,000m2 of steel sheets, 5,000km of electric cables, 90,000m2 of carpet, and a daily 4.1 million litres of freshwater are used for the cruise liner. There’s a water park, a golf driving range, an ice-skating rink, a climbing wall, spa, planetarium, night club, casino, a tropical garden, wave simulator for surfers, over 30 restaurants and bars, 15 swimming pools and an auditorium… Yep, it’s terrible.
“A crazy world that we laugh at, but not with a joyful laugh”*
The images could give rise to a smile; the absurdity of the scenes is laughter-worthy. But in this patriarchal world, the shadiest social codes of our society wield even more power. It may seem senseless to leave terra firma to escape a society where this “happiness trend” is already sold to us — just well away from those already excluded from the trend — to reproduce it.
The cruise liner also possesses a powerful symbolism, and the images of Venice under the shadow of these giants hit those accustomed to the world of art in particular. Should it all burn? Sink? A virus kill off a powerful but fragile industry..?
This work is a Coproduction Région Occitanie (help to create), Occitanie films for a call for projects by DRAC / Région Occitanie, Centre d’Art de Vénissieux/E. A. P. Madeleine Lambert
* G. Minois, “De la Folie négative (Brant) à la folie positive (Érasme)” – section 17, in Histoire du Rire et de la Dérision, Fayard, 2000 — quoted in the text accompanying the exhibition.
