2013 COMMUNE IMAGE PARIS BAPTIST COELHO: UNE PIÈCE DE MONNAIE DE MONSIEUR RISSO

Une pièce de monnaie de Monsieur Risso, 2012-13, video  HD, 15min

Commune Image

8, rue Godillot

93400 Saint Ouen 

Paris, France

 

This video is a co-production between TRIAD and Synesthesie (Saint-Denis) and has received the support from Fondation Buchet Ponsoye (Paris),  Pavillon Neuflize OBC (Paris), Commune Image (Saint-Ouen) and the non-profit organisation Chooseone.org  also from Saint-Ouen.

Baptist Coelho’s work takes it’s inspiration from personal research associated by a strong cultural and geographical interest. Coelho centres his attention on certain aspects of life of which he excerpts certain aspects of life for giving us his interpretation which speaks to everyone. He does not privilege one medium more than another and keeps a very special link between his life and his particular personal life, taken out of his near environment which he replaces in a global perspective.

Last Year he was invited by Synesthesie for a residence at the Récollets, with the support of the Institut Français and therefore at this very occasion  Coelho has concentrated his attention on our own relationship to History which includes a certain reality towards the fabrication of munitions in the region just outside of Paris, where  Syneshesie is located in Seine-Saint Denis in particular, during the second world war,.

Out of this observation several captions and interviews have taken place with some active actors of this period. The point of departure of the project started with a conversation with Monsieur Risso, a Résistant from September 1940. During this meeting Monsieur Risso has given a 2 francs coin in aluminium, produced in 1947 and certified that this piece existed because all the other yellow one’s had been melted for producing munitions during the war. Of course, if it is from 1947, why would they still produce them in aluminium?

Of course, the protagonists of this fiction have their own version of that particular aluminium coin. History is a source of divergent interpretations and this sudden animated piece tries to understand everywhere from the library to the pocket of a priest why it is so light, who knows?

Cécile Bourne-Farrell, curator of the project