La mince dalle de béton de la place Saint Lambert vibre un peu au passage des poids lourds. Elle recouvre les vestiges emmêlés d’une villa romaine, de la cathédrale, de deux-mille ans d’histoire. De part et d’autre, le palais de justice et les galeries commerciales se font face. Les skateboards y font inlassablement leurs figures. Les sans-abris y confluent et les dealers font leurs affaires.
Un tunnel obscur avale et recrache ses autobus.
La dalle tremble parfois, imaginons qu’elle se soulève et pivote à la verticale, présent et passé entrent alors en collision, le centre commercial s’ouvre sur la cathédrale, le palais de justice sur la villa romaine. La folie contemporaine se jette dans le gouffre ainsi ouvert.
The thin pre-stressed concrete slab slightly vibrates as the trucks pass by. It extends over the most part of the square and covers the tangled remains of a Roman villa and the cathedral, two thousand years of history. The courthouse and the shopping malls face each other on either side of the slab. Skateboarders are tirelessly rolling from one side to the other. It’s also the place where the precarious and the homeless gather; it is also an area for drug business.
The dark tunnel keeps swallowing and spitting out its buses.
The slab sometimes vibrates; it could also rise up vertically. Present and past would then collide; the shopping mall would open onto the cathedral, the courthouse onto the Roman villa. Contemporary madness would tumble into the open abyss.
vidéo 4K
duration: 15’20’’
direction: Michel Couturier
assistant director: Marie-Emilie Tylleman
images: Noé Dohet, Michel Couturier
sound recording: Christopher Bouts
actors: Anne-Marie Loop, Selçuk Mutlu
composition and mixing: Yannick Frank
colour grading: Miléna Trivier
production: Dérives asbl
art director : Laurent Jacob
with the help from: Archéoforum de Liège, Musée Wittert & Mrs Edith Micha, Trésor de Liège, Mr. Roger Collinet, Les Sentinelles de la Nuit asbl and Mrs. Chantal Degée
with the support of Service des Arts Plastiques de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles