The vantage point allows access to the unreadable. Mankind’s desire to stand upon the highest height and look down upon the mess he has made is not a phenomenon without its practical side. Perception is confidence, influence and power. Integrated into the horizon, there is a coded language for projecting our will upon the future, or for extracting our interests from it. Marine Hugonnier has produced a body of work that describes this type of temporal response while locating within it a utopian ideology.

A panoramic vantage point permits the viewer to control the area he can see. The boundaries, strategically speaking, extend as far as the eye can see -- granting a kind of ownership of the place. In this sense, perspective is a symptom of geographical conquest. The resulting position of influence provides a means of controlling the surrounding environment. Film acts as a vehicle for this kind of conquest and is in itself a vessel for information and influence. As such, the point of view provides access and influence to otherwise uncharted territory.

In Hugonnier's past work, she manipulates time and its perception through the projection of a "future" onto the artwork. Candle, a candle that, when lit, permeates the scent of a candle that has just been extinguished, describes its fate while achieving a temporal paradox. Her series of photographs titled Towards Tomorrow (International Dateline Alaska) uses a retrospective medium to document the fast approaching future, looking into the onslaught of time. In each case, the paradox causes the work to cancel itself out, and the viewer must consider what is left in the context of illusion and the passage of time.

A predominant theme in Hugonnier's work, in particular her recent film Ariana is that of the arcadia, or pastoral utopia. If utopia is in fact a plane that exists as separate from reality, then film is perhaps a device through which we may experience it. This is not to say that her work is utopic, but rather that the elements, the desirable elements, derived from the vantage points perceived within the film describe a potential for an arcadia within an international disaster area and beyond the human experience. The ultimate denial of the complete panorama, as deliberately influenced by the artist, perhaps mirrors our exclusion from a more tangible utopic vision.

Set in Afghanistan in the aftermath of September 11, the film Ariana overcomes the stigma of terror that blanketed the country in the months to follow, and although the film employs several of the tactics seen in recent "raw" documentary, it presents a position that does not succumb to the sentimentality of a liberal post-war production. Instead, Ariana provides an arena for the resistance it so actively describes -- consistently unfolding dualities and conflicts within itself that reflect the disparate nature of the socio-political climate of the region and its populous.

Mountains with no names, a series of large scale photographs of the mountains in the Pandjshêr Valley, identifies the utilitarian nature of the name in a geographical climate and isolates this place as being exempt from western rules of conquest and category. The mountains have no names as there is no cause to name them -- there is no one who uses them. The purpose they serve politically, strategically, socially and historically does not demand from them any identifying feature aside from that of their terrain. The absence of identity of these mountains, except for their vantage points, serves as a reference to utopia as a heritage -- a time always having gone before and a different kind of influence. This too is a place that does not exist for human use.

All of Hugonnier's work manipulates "given" concepts of temporality as they relate to the media she chooses. Within her work there are a number of silent imperatives demanding reflection or introspection. As such, the interlude is a concept of acute importance in Hugonnier's work. The blank space as it is used in her films identifies a passage of time from which the viewer is excluded, at once allowing for the viewer to extract his own interpretation of the scenes before and after. Interpreted as vantage points in their own right, these "empty" syllables that occur throughout the film provide a system of navigation through the narrative topography of the work itself and the history it presents.

Hugonnier's work plays with the concepts of temporality, distance and control and on a larger scale designs a means of interpreting the relationships between these concepts. This work locates the current political tensions within the philosophical landscape that exists in between the real and the perceived. The same mountainside is at once a vision of paradise, a battlefield and a social divider. The temporal questions in Hugonnier's films and her other works release the future and the past from any implication in the pursuit of utopia. Instead, the focus is on the single perspective and the paradox that lies between the summit and the scene below.

Emily McMehen
May 2003