HORIZONTAL FALL

of FATMI Mounir

FRANCE, 2007, 00:12:00

Production : FATMI Mounir
Genre : Video art
Keyword : Relation, social relations, Town planning

Summary :
"(…)Fatmi made his eerily prescient video Horizontal Fall, 2000 from footage he shot in Val Fourré, a troubled development in the Parisian banlieue of Mantes-la-Jolie. The video features the demolition of two 18-story residential towers at precisely 2:30pm on Sunday October 1st, 2000. The public housing complex, built in 1973, was victim to a local redevelopment project.  For the occasion, the local town hall commissioned a program of sound, music and dance, “Tours Sonnantes” (“Singing Towers”), played on loud speakers temporarily installed throughout the community. This “urban opera,” written by the composer Kamil Tchalaev, was accompanied by choreography arranged by Sabine Jamet, featuring the participation of children from Val Fourré. The audio program included a Muslim call to prayer (which Fatmi captures in his video), as well as the angelus of a local Catholic congregation. Fatmi’s video opens with the sound of sirens, followed by the announcement on Radio Droite de Cité of the scheduled destruction of towers seven and nine. Following the song of the muezzin, the twin towers, wrapped in white bandage-like banners, fall in tandem. “A page in the history of Val Fourré has been turned,” a voice on the radio ventures, “twenty-seven years of history have tumbled.”  A cloud of dust blows across the landscape, and Fatmi’s lens follows dozens of families as they move within metal barriers to return to what has become an empty space. (…)"

Lillian Davies, Excerpt from Suspect Language, Skira, 2012. 

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