Philippe Bazin's Video and Photo Installation on Migration and Colonial Legacy

Philippe Bazin's exhibition at Galerie Anne Barrault in Paris (November 3 to December 22, 2007) presents seven video screens showing testimonies from Dunkirk residents of Comorian immigrant background, filmed in close-up, alongside 19th-century ethnographic plaster casts. The videos recount contemporary exclusion and racism, while the casts evoke colonial subjugation. Bazin, known since 1985 for photographic series of newborns, the elderly, and prisoners, has worked with video since 2000. The installation juxtaposes living speech with fossilized figures, splitting the face between two regimes of reproduction and historicity. The viewer activates the testimonial process, allowing narratives to unfold through superimpositions, forming an archive in Michel Foucault's sense. The archaeological aspect of the documentary device reveals the violence of the face struggling under the mask—the Greeks and Romans practiced live casting. The spectator must gauge the constellation between these staring gorgons and the speakers who bare the socio-historical thread of their condition. Additional panoramic photo prints of Porto and its container ships reframe exile and migration through the mythic form of sea voyage, opening the invisible crossing of historical time where borders and human destinies clash. Bazin's montage engages an epistemology of contemporary art through anachronisms, anthropomorphic reflections, and speech acts.