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Second Burial at Le Blanc
Looped 16mm film projection, colour, silent, 8 minutes 18 seconds
Ticker-tape countdown clock, customised printer with glass dome and ash
base, height 66cm, Ø 30cm, length of paper variable
(counting down the hours, minutes and seconds to the last francs to be exchanged
on 17 February 2012, with live currency feed via wireless internet)
On Hoarding, Accumulating, and Gifting
Newspaper (French & English), distributed in Le Blanc and Dublin, edition
1500 & available as a free pdf online here
The new film produced by Sarah Browne for her solo exhibition Second Burial at Le Blanc follows a procession through the streets of a smallFrench town. For the last nine years, and until Friday 17th February 2012 ,the Central Bank of France will continue to exchange francs for euro. The procession – in which local residents carry a glass domed ‘ticker-tape countdown clock’ from the new part of the town to the old – is a commemorative event, marking the waning days of the franc, and the changed economic circumstances which now plague the euro. In a newspaper called On Hoarding, Accumulation, and Gifting made by Sarah Browne and distributed to localresidents prior to the procession, a statement from German ChancellorAngela Merkel surmises: ‘The current crisis facing the euro is the biggest test Europe has faced in decades. It is an existential test and it must be overcome… if the euro fails, then Europe fails.’
The ticker-tape countdown clock at the centre of both the film and the exhibition is a live, wifi-enabled machine. This is based on the original stock ticker machines that produced endless snakes of paper strips, as stock market data from all over the world was transmitted via telegraph to trading floors and information boards. This by-product of the financial markets found a secondary use for the first time in 1886 when streams of ticker tape were spontaneously flung from high-rise windows in celebration of the parade that welcomed the Statue of Liberty to New York, gifted by France. With the idea of a ‘ticker-tape parade’ now commonly recognized throughout the world, Sarah Browne combines concepts of financial trade alongside the many mixed messages of technological development […] The artist has built a sculpture that produces a memorial: it is both marking a finite period of decline by printing the countdown to the 17th February next year, and also the catalyst for making a film which will outlast the context of its time and provide a window into the past. Inevitably, this exhibition in Dublin – a stone’s throw from the Central Bank of Ireland and made by an Irish artist – will be identified with the crisis of the Irish economy in 2010, Portugal in 2011, with the possibility of future loan defaults underscoring the insecurity of EU member states’ relationships to their common currency, the euro. The International Monetary Fund is also a spectre in the background to this story, France being the first nation to accept a loan from the IMF in 1947, and Ireland the most recent. The gallery for this exhibition period is a physical space to encounter ideas about the increasingly abstract financial structures that are our future as much as the material souvenirs of our past.
—Tessa Giblin, Curator of Visual Arts, Project Arts Centre
Co-produced by Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
Funded by a Project Award from the Arts Council
Fabrication and Software Development: Jack Phelan
Interpreter / Production Assistant: Julien Dorgere
Director of Photography: Lukas Demgenski
Graphic Design: Peter Maybury
Additional Translation: Susan Thomson
With thanks to Art’Com’In Le Blanc, Mairie du Blanc, Ecomusée du Brenne, La Maison des Amis du Blanc, Sylvie Auteau, Hélène Guillemot, Helen Carey, Romilly Masters and Jeananne McGovern.
