diaporama

Élodie Pong

Born in 1966 in Boston (US).
Lives and works in Zurich (CH)

  

Untitled (Plan For Victory)

2006
Video, colour, sonore
Duration: 1'21''
Purchased in: 2006

The snow is falling
It is still snowing
It will continue snowing

Lawrence Durrell, The Black Book, The Obelisk Press, 1938.

In a mountain landscape, the phrase “Plan for Victory” is tagged pink in the snow. Suddenly, an avalanche crashes down and razes everything in its way.

Enigmatic and unsettling, this short video by Elodie Pong underscores the radicality and the subversion which define her work. At ease with video, performance, installation, and writing, the artist explores simultaneously the notions of culture and nature, of fiction and reality. Born in Boston, Mass. in 1966 and residing in Switzerland for several years, Elodie Pong has been profoundly marked by the dichotomies within politics and identity. Having studied sociology and anthropology, she records and redefines a lexical field inherent in cultural codes and social phenomena. By appropriating the codes, norms, and languages, she reveals their ambivalence in order to formulate a virulent critique of American society.

In Untitled (Plan for Victory), Elodie Pong focuses on a military expression used by the Bush administration during the third Gulf war. This strategic slogan has epitomized the Bush doctrine and its principle of preemptive war: what some have called the “new American empire.” In mass-mediated societies, politics and advertising communicate essentially through slogans. This incessant “bombarding” disrupts our relation to the rhetoric and meaning of words. Relying on these cultural reversals, Elodie Pong brings to light the tragedy of the world’s future. In the allegoric landscape in which the announcement of war is decontenxtualized, the voluntarist dimension and the rigorous emphasis of the slogan are subverted, rendered absurd. The formal use of the graffiti tag—clandestine urban practice oscillating between demand and vandalism—defuses a whole range of information run by a media circus.

It is essential for Elodie Pong to let the different layers of meanings collide. With the image of the avalanche, she alludes to the prevailing doom-and-gloom discourse on climate, and inscribes her video in a reflection on the marking of territory, from its annexation to its domination. Presenting the rebellion of natural elements in a contemporary disaster, the video possesses a striking force magnified by the roar of the soundtrack. By confronting the ideological weight of the slogan with the power of nature, Elodie Pong announces the time of defeat—when everything topples down, when there is nothing to hold on to. In the contemporary ruin in which propaganda and political domination fail, the video Untitled (Plan for Victory) underscores the fragility of ideals and their foundations.

^{Marianne Derrien}

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