Historico vagabond — Alberta Pane Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 22 → July 27, 2013

Historico-vagabond offers instant rewriting of history through the visionary thinking of Jose Noriega. He is an Argentine theorist who settled in the United States in the early twentieth century; a friend of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, Noriega had realized early on that conflicting accounts could arise from a single theory. He decided to falsify history to create a better world and make people happy, willingly or unwillingly. He organized sessions of individual and collective hypnosis during which he could change traumas into happy memories, influence the future by revisiting the past, and rethink the present with regard to the future.

José Noriega’s mind is the theoretical framework of the exhibition; a section of archival material is dedicated to him. The artists in the show are interested in history and its renewal; they question the methods of infiltration and ideals. Luciana Lamothe, Jasper Coppes and Charlotte York infiltrate the secret treasures of history while Jeanne Gillard and Nicolas Rivet present a recontextualized version of soap sculptures that Bernays had initiated. In But a grainy film, Fabio Kacero modifies his own video by adding to it a very critical prose of a New York Times journalist regarding his work. Dalibor Martinis journeys through time and splits the screen into a set of artistic and ontological questions / answers, while the haunting music of Kraftwerk and repetitive images of Fritz Lang surround the exhibition space and automate some of the visitor’s wandering. During the conferences / performances, Axel Straschnoy will present his current research on secret agents and Åbäke will analyze the life and work of Charlotte York.

Consisting of historical documents, reappropriations, and fictional archives, and reconstructions, Historico-vagabond seeks to create a temporal paradox. Rewriting history is a potential tool for positive change, rather than looking toward the future, as did the modernist utopias, we change the past in order to magnify the present, by traveling back in time to create a deviation and to then offer an alternate timeline.