My got angry a scene and deleted all our holiday pictures
In the South of France, Arles is not the only place where photography takes center stage. A few kilometers away from the renowned Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, the Theater Festival of Avignon invited a young Estonian collective, Teater 99, which also gives pride of place to photography.
“My wife got angry and deleted all our holiday pictures”: the main character of this play has to face a tragic event. He dreams of reconstituting the missing album, “ruined” by his wife: 32 gigas deleted from the memory stick. Other characters will help him, posing and staging his holiday memories.
It all starts in a pasty hotel room, decorated with two impassive and exotic photographs of gilded sphinxes. Visibly restless, overwhelmed by tics and anxiety, the main character strides across the room. Suddenly, strangers appear, ready to stage for him all the pictures of the vanished family album. Smiles in the plane, restaurant scenes, weariness at night in the hotel room, beach, hiking… In-between these four walls, they reconstitute the snapshots of familial happiness. Their black-and-white pictures are projected live on a wide screen.
Then, everything goes amiss. The camera is also a toy, and little by little, other characters take hold of it to imagine unscheduled scenes. “The next picture is a kiss at sunset”, suggests one of them. They take party pictures, scuba-diving photographs, war images; they restage iconic images and film scenes…
How could they, indeed, reproduce the overly accurate desires for pictures of the main character? “Your memories are so perfect, what is the point of taking photos?”, asks the character playing his wife. “I need accurate pictures, if I do not retrieve them it all gets hazy”, he answers. Actually, he may not be looking for these perfect pictures, indicating superficial happiness, but for what went wrong, what did not fit in the box: “Everything was a mistake”, he concludes.
Estonian collective Teater 99 gave this play the number 51. They started at number 99, hence their name, and will go, play after play, back to zero. This time, their work questions photographers. Ene-Liis Semper, cofounder of the collective, explained to AFP: “the most beautiful compliment we had came from photographers who witnessed the photo rehearsal. They told us that they were so enthralled by the work we did with photographs that they forgot to take their own pictures of the play!”
This funny and provocative play examines our need to photograph everything. Ene-Liis Semper explains: “what is intimate is now shared by everybody. Why should this be the picture of happiness?” These photographs are trophies, they confirm our rites of passage, certify familial happiness and solidify memories. There can be no experience without testimony, no party without camera, no holiday without album.
