Le jugement de Pâris
Video installation, 1997 / 9 min / Screen 325 x 250 cm / Trophies (three doe’s heads), weapons (pistols, machine guns), armchair, rug, bedside light, green-painted wall / Galerie Art & Public, Geneva.
I finally had a chance to produce this already old project in 1997, as a result of my meeting with Pierre Huber. I shot this video in a single take, with a non-actor: Martin Gosset. I had been telling him about this project for a long time, and I was hanging on his answer. It was not an easy shoot to do, and he was one of the rare men among my friends who seemed to be able to carry it off.
Le jugement de Pâris [The Judgment of Paris] involves the story of a man who, going beyond the humiliation he suffers, tries to assume the non-heroic part of himself (his feminine side). I did not have a studio and I knew that the Beaubourg studio was available. Because I did not expect a positive response from the woman in charge of the premises, I had the idea of filming the video illegally, as it were, thus making the situation even more uncertain and tricky. On the first night we tried out the lights, then we shot on the next night. I remember painting a corner of the studio grey, then painting it black at four o’clock in the morning with an odourless paint. At nine o’clock that morning, you would not have known anybody had been there…