Sylvie Blocher

This work was produced on request of the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d’art contemporain, for the exhibition Luxembourg, les Luxembourgeois organised by the History Museum of the City of Luxembourg, an historical commemoration about Luxembourg and its inhabitants. My initial project was to film a Living Picture with bankers from the city about the erotic pleasure of money. Two months before filming was due to start, the project had to be dropped. Men in Gold, the initial title, thus became Men in Pink. I asked the Paris-based gay choir, Les Caramels Fous, to sing two songs which had marked the 20th century: The International and Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, taken from the “March of the Dwarfs” in Walt Disney’s Snow White. Those two songs, with their contrasting ideologies, had promised to bring happiness to the world. But because the communist revolution had self-destructed and the capitalist empire had invaded the world, I asked the choir to sing those two songs one after the other. When they get their pink nylon stockings out of the pockets of their suits and put them over their heads like robbers masks, and when they make holes in them by digging their fingers into their mouths, they just keep staring at us. You feel like laughing, but the laughter gets stuck in your throat. We filmed that video one Sunday in the main hall of the IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris.

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