The Colour of the Cosmos [La couleur du Cosmos]
Maxime Bondu
Solo exhibition, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
23-27/09/2016
[Exhibition views | Vues d'exposition]
[Visitors' guide | Guide de visite]
[Project website | Lien vers le projet]
EN
Built in 1964 during the Soviet period in Plovdiv, the Cosmos Cinema closed in 1999. It was the site of 35 years of projection of films and ideology and is thus a reflection of the political and social history of the country before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The rationalist building (architect: Lyubomir Shinkov), expresses both monumentality and an idea of the future contained in the former Eastern bloc.
“La couleur du Cosmos” is a quest focused on the building and the ideology of the Cosmos. Following extensive research on-site in 2015, Maxime Bondu wanders among possible images of the Cosmos. In search of the invisible, he found traces in a few fragments of paint fallen from the ceiling, in the cobwebs in the flooded basement, in a programme stained with ink and also in his attempts at deducing the persistent colour of the screen, that is to say the dominant colour achieved by superimposing photograms of each of the hundreds of films shown at the cinema. He worked with Julien Griffit to have the films analyzed by an algorithm developed for the occasion. After two weeks of calculation, a server network returned #282320, a hexadecimal code specifying a colour. Transferred to 35mm film and shown in a loop, it was found to be extremely difficult to project because of its dark shade.
With the support of Institut Français - Bulgarie, Bulgarian National Culture Fund and Open Arts Foundation