Emilie Renault and Ghislain Botto place paper, pen and microphone on the Place des Nations in Geneva for a week. Facing the UN, this noisy square dressed all in grey and flags, surrounded by roads and by the sector’s NGOs, is intended for demonstrations, protests and other gatherings.
“Let’s demonstrate! Let’s demonstrate! You might think the square is very angry, but the echo of clamour and banners is only due to the porous slabs of its surface, sometimes watered by the movements of the fountain that punctuates it. What could be better in the summer heat refreshed by the water jets than to offer a BAR to collect all this? No drinking, no consumption – the rules of the place prohibit it -, but a Bureau des Archives des Revendications [Office for Protest Archives] to record and collect the memory of these human gatherings all too quickly disappeared from people’s minds. Using just a Bic pen, the photos, slogans and other demands are patiently and slowly traced and copied by the two artists on a long roll of paper during three days of exchanges and recordings of the mobilizations, taking us on a journey Syria, Kurdistan, Turkey, Sri Lanka; and questioning our relationship to others, to conflicts, and to global issues.
According to a slow and seemingly vain game of patience, the scroll is covered with graffiti, graphic hubbub offered by the square to illusions of free expression fallen into oblivion. The BAR and its logo, crowned with victorious laurels referencing the formal composition of the graphics of historical NGOs, proposes to be the memory of these individual or collective stories, and to represent the struggles in progress in their true measure. A new world is thus taking shape, through the prism of this human wealth and the hopes gathered at the Place des Nations.
Original French text by Lucie Cabanes
© Collectif EthnoGraphic