(version Française)

Oh Bruno I see you beneath the archway of aerodynamics 1

 

In the town where I was born, Bordeaux, there were only two bridges on the city centre quays at the time, the Eiffel railway gangway, names after the industrial engineer who developed the metallic framework in France and who participated in the construction of the Statue of Liberty, and the Pont de Pierre that was built under Napoléon's reign, named after an emperor for whom travels abroad were not that successful.

In the town where I live, Lyon, there are a certain number of bridges, which I don't know their names. I sometimes mistake them; I don't look at them much. So I name the bridges according to the neighborhoods that connects them. The bridge between X and Y. Today, I rarely walk on them. When I do, I look at people's back and bottom. Not too much in the eyes. I distrust the bikes that ride against me. I don't pay attention to pieces of conversation. I distractedly look at the inhabited architecture; I look at the city, its buildings without wondering about their users. I am distracted, meek, rarely in a hurry. Maybe I'm sexy cool.2

I really admire bridges' builders. This may be the only work that still deserves the qualifying of technique and artistic innovation. The feasibility study is huge although the completed work only requires from its users an easy task: crossing. Crossing with a truck, in a bus, with a car, a motorcycle, a motorized scooter, a bike, a skateboard, roller boots, a scooter, by feet or even in socks.

 

« Ride a Vélib' at night on ecstasy

At night

In Paris »

 

Parivélib', Philippe Katerine

 

This is a bit how one could qualify the artist Bruno Silva in his video. A marginal walk through a city that has a very suggestive name. Bruno Silva crosses, by foot and in socks, holding his shoes on his hand, the Brooklyn Bridge (does it have a proper name, I don't know). Silent sequence shot. It is long but you don't get bored (this corresponds a bit to the time I could spend on reading Heidegger again). You don't think about the water that is flowing underneath. The video is silent. It is strange how deaf people must consider NY as a noisy city.

The skyline looks like a mirage, out of touch. You look at the bouncy dream of a tailing with a «subjective camera».

 

If one tends to reduce the work of an expatriate artist through his culture of origin and his nationality (Bruno Silva is a Portuguese artist living and working in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Period. Goes to NY. Exclamation mark.), there are also a certain number of cities, just a few actually, that overwhelm our own culture by absorbing it straight away. So when I watched Bruno Silva's video, on which you can see him from his back while he crosses the Brooklyn bridge in socks, I wondered if I wouldn't have actually enjoyed crossing, in an exhilarating anonymity, this bridge, ultimate fantasy of the occidental European, influenced by a one-way like transatlantic culture. The night after,  I would dream of doing that while listening to some music tracks on my earphones.

 

French artists are envious.

I started by watching the shoes in the artist's right hand, his socks and then his back. Then the skyline and finally the bridge. People that he sees, from time to time. It mostly depends on their inertia and their eyes. I wonder who built this bridge, that influenced New York's urban planning, its skyline.

 

American people have a particular way of exporting their « Dream ». According to me, Eiffel3 will forever be an heroic character, Napoléon a colonist (Christophe) who took the wrong path, Kurt Russel a one-eyed antihero, and Bruno Silva a quiet walker, here, and there, just like at home. I am Bruno. This bridge is the extension of my trip, of an attitude; the artist, the migrant vector.

 

Sexy cool.

 

An American dream, an American afternoon.

 

 

by Simon Feydieu about the video Unnamed_0.1.2.1_1

 

 

 

1 Oh Alexander I see you beneath the archway of aerodynamics, lyrics of the song Alec Eiffel by the Pixies.

2 Sexy Cool, blurry concept developed by Philippe Katerine in his album Magnum (2014)

3 Gustave Eiffel, who worked on the footbridge, saved the life of a worker who fell in the Garonne by diving in the river to get him out of the water before he drowns.

4 In the SyFy movie New York 1997 by John Carpenter, all the bridges in the city are impracticable because they were bombed.