Unmade Film: The Reconnaissance presents extracts from a fictional conversation about a possible future film between Pier Paolo Pasolini, Robert Smithson (spoken by three voices), overheard sometime between 1963 and 1967, somewhere between Palestine and New Jersey. The backdrop of the conversation consists of ‘pastoral’ scenes of ruins in Palestine: Lifta, the only remaining ruin of more than 400 villages that were depopulated in 1948 and a new, unfinished construction near Ramallah.
Voices: Valérie de Dietrich, Vincent Ozanon, Jérôme Robart
Translation: Rula Giacaman (Arabic), Daniela Almansi (French)
A second part to Remnants of the Future, this film goes back to the original Mush in Eastern Anatolia. Unlike the ghost town in Armenia named after it, in this now Turkish city the ghosts themselves have become homeless.
Plans for the Past explores how this place is a palimpsest imbued with former life, historical spirits, and topographical particularities; how it is personed. The task of the spectre is to remind us that the past is an unfinished business. The logic of haunting thus disrupts the idea of chronological time, it de-synchronises time and unsettles space.
President Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal from a balcony of the Cotton Exchange in Alexandria. Implicit in this gesture was the nationalisation of the cotton trade and therefore the redundancy of the cotton exchange. Today there is a car park where the building once stood.
