How Long Is “Tour Solaire”?

The video Tour Solaire begins by reversing the view: instead of measuring the remoteness of outer space, the view glides first from the observation platform of a disused observatory over Paris and then ultimately turns towards the interior of the tower. Overlaid by the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, the camera moves through the abandoned observatory and then lingers on a few lifeless flies. The video is determined by scenarios veering between the suggestion of distance, the observation of concrete spaces and their details, the shift between inside and outside, between objectification and psychological interiors. The observatory appears here like a mute, unreal monument of an alien culture, like the instrument of a science beset by its own fictionalisation.