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ISABELLE PAUWELS's adventures in history
What is it about ordinary, everyday objects that makes them so impossible to discard? Why do they accumulate on our desks, in our living rooms and in boxes out in the garage? Take, for instance, the objects that appear in Isabelle Pauwels's video W.E.S.T.E.R.N., which was shown earlier this year at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. These are the kinds of objects you might expect to find at a flea market: an old set of copper scales, African statues, floor lamps missing their shades. In W.E.S.T.E.R.N. these objects have been gathered from around the house and are introduced to the camera by Pauwels's mother, who stands in front of a white screen in the middle of her living room in Richmond, British Columbia, picks up a microphone and presents each item as though it is a piece of evidence in a court case. Exhibit A: a floor lamp made from the root of a coffee plant affixed to a round metal base. Exhibit B: a statue of a farmer that was shipped out of the Congo by Pauwels's Belgian family before the country gained its independence in 1960. Exhibit C: a statue of a seated African boy with an inscription on his backside that reads "Optimum Registered Trademark."
What we can immediately gather is that these assorted objects share a collective past. They are not random relics from the family's attic, but a carefully selected collection brought together to relate a particular history. Held in front of the camera, the objects become material indicators of the events that the video attempts to trace. Rather than relating a story in a linear manner, however, following a cast of characters through scenes that form a plot, the video is organized in six sections, a series of snippets whose juxtapositions are at times as dissonant and knotted as history itself. W.E.S.T.E.R.N. is filmed and edited in a way that emulates the fragmentary nature of archives, personal stories and memories.
In Pauwels's video, scenes shot...