LARA TABET & RANDA MIRZA (LE)
Residency period: January-March 2022
BLINDSPOT is an audiovisual performance articulated around the omnipresence of the technological and scientific images which observe the sky and probe the cells, governing both human and non-human worlds. This projectis based on the notion of non-place, as developed by the anthropologist Marc Augé, and explores the politico-poetic potential of the heterotopic space that is the museum, the theater, the concert hall or the cultural institution by diverting its surveillance device in a playful and disturbing way.
During our residency at la Becque, we filmed multiple scenes of the performance, using the reflection on Lac Leman and the Swiss winter light. The residency allowed us as well to research appropriated footage of tracked animals, new medical imagery, big data and edit them with recordings from surveillance devices previously shot at the museum Mucem in France.
We researched modified scientific protocols, cut and pasted literary texts and poems weaved into a speculative fiction that questions the hegemony of science and technology in today’s world.
The performance was presented at Mucem in Marseille half way through our residency at La Becque. We used our remaining time there to present it in the form of a sound and video installation during the open studio at La Becque. — Lara Tabet & Randa Mirza
“Jeanne et Moreau” is the name of artist duo of Lara Tabet and Randa Mirza. The duo started working in 2018 on a long-term project called End-to-End Encrypted in reference to the data encryption system, in which only the communicating users can read the messages.
This work draws on their common image bank and questions the relationship of the two artists to new digital technologies and their place in the world as queer women artists. It accompanies the trajectory of their couple as well as their relationship to the photographic medium and to the contexts of production, transmission, sharing and reception of images.