Spiritofboz

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This feature was shot in september 2005, documenting the performance "The End of Time", during the Festival of Flanders. This haunting performance was the meeting between Olivier Messiaen’s music (Quartet for the End of Time) , Primo Levi’s  words (If this is a man) and Julien Friedler’s installation The Innocents.

The Innocents could be Julien Friedler’s most emblematic work. Created in 1999, it has been exposed in Milan (2003) and Paris (2004). It’s currently settled in Julien Friedler’s atelier.

Combining barbed wire, a cage, dolls and soft toys, skeletons, both stained and clean linen, photographs, quotations and various objects, the work evokes at once concentration camps, violated and abused childhood, school as a prison-like world, and the martyrdom of the Jews in starkly contrasting, macabre scenes and intense colours, constructed around the figure of Jack Balance, Julien Friedler’s clown-like double.

From Passepartout TV Show by and with Philippe Daverio (Rai 3, Italy), February 2003.

Jean-Paul Shintzu :

"Music and text come together here to evoke and describe the same subject - the universe of the concentration camp - and join each other in the same spirit : a certain uprising against barbarism. It was already a first to associate Olivier Messiaen’s music, performed for the first time in a labour camp in Poland, and the testimony written by Primo Levi upon his return from Auschwitz.
(…)
To make them co-exist in Julien Friedler’s installation is to provide them with the opportunity to escape from a certain abstraction in order to confront them with the work of a contemporary artist, who is reflecting upon this barbarism 60 years after the facts."

Says Julien Friedler :

"I created what I felt. The barbed wire, the stuffed dolls, the school benches… a tragic but a the same time playful setting. I used a langauge of extremes : childhood and death, that is the Shoah of course, but it’s also a metaphor for an imprisoned childhood… for all the  children all over the world who have been killed or whose innocence has been injured."

Prof. Dr Joel Kotek (Director of training at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris and Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles) :

"Well, Julien Frieldler’s installation (but is it really an installation ?) confounded me, fascinated and even convinced me because of the power of its evocation and its accuracy. His work is powerful, intelligent, as well as useful. It will help (and I do sincerely hope it will) young people understand what the Shoah really represented : a generalised attack on life, specifically on the life of Jewish children. This is what Julien Friedler tries to show us, not smugly, but using tact and dignity.(…)"

Excerpt from a letter sent to Julien Friedler by Philippe Daverio, Professor of Aesthetics :

"Although your installation bears witness to abominable historic events and although it symbolizes the Shoah in a particularly poignant manner, your work goes beyond the mere illustration of the historic fact.

Its impact bears witness in a more expansive manner to the drama of human existence, which is already confronted with suffering, frustration and violence in childhood.

Your work also accentuates the anguishing presence of contemporary man in the world, of his destructive force toward his own species, but also man’s devastating impact on the world itself.

"The Innocents" is more than just a touching and moving symbol. This installation urges people to see things in a much broader context, which is only possible through the artist’s eyes."

More about this work :

> the "Innocents" Flickr photoset.

> the CGI animation version of the Innocents (video teaser).

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 5:10 pm and is filed under 2- Gallery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.