In one of his last recorded conversations with Ross Bleckner from 1995, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres recounts: “People would say, “Can I come to your studio?” And, I’d say, “Sure, but my studio is underneath my bed.”
Activating this historical conversation around queer love, sickness and loss, and how it all translates into art and artistic practice, Soufiane Ababri invites the spectators to take part in a trans-historical imaginary exchange between himself, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ross Bleckner. A partial reenactment of the 1995 conversation between Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ross Bleckner, the script of “Paradox I” isolates a selection of passages from this dialogue and enhances certain expressions through repetition, simultaneous action and exaggeration. Using the cut-out technique to work through the content, Ababri stages this two-person performance inside a green screen scenography, adopting the filming technique to first emphasize the separation between content and context in strategies of capture, and second to open the possibility of post-production and video circulation as avenues for proliferations of meaning and authorship. Much like the insertion of a new background in post production processes, the scenography introduces the idea of recovering historical and anecdotal knowledge which retains an emancipatory potential when activated in a new context. The green screen device blurs the distinctions between reality and dream, reality and apparatus of fiction, as a source of both anxiety and creativity, while the title of the work reveals order and logic as necessary fictions in our apprehension of the world surrounding us.
