NANCY IN JULY

►SYNOPSIS

In July 2017, the artists Andrea Garay and Alfonso Legaz set out on a journey to meet the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, at his home in Strasbourg, and to discuss with him, among other things, about the categories of “the presentable” and “ the non-presentable ” in the context of audiovisual documentary practices and contemporary artistic production, from the experience of his project 20 ESPEJOS SUCEDEN (20 MIRRORS HAPPEN), which attends figures and elements of the philosopher’s aesthetic thought applied on the documentary presentation of the body, making a cinematographic portrait of the thinker, international authority around the thought of the in-common, around the sense of being together.

►CONCEPT

"Le besoin d'être en-commun n'est pas celui d'une loi physique, et celui qui veut l'exposer doit aussi s'y exposer (c'est ce qu'on peut appeler («pensée», «écriture» et sa partition). Telle est au contraire la complaisance qui menace tout discours de la communauté (aussi le mien par conséquent): croire (re) présenter par sa propre communication une co-humanité dont la vérité, cependant, n'est pas une essence donnée et (re)présentable." / La Communauté désœuvrée, (2001). Jean-Luc Nancy.

NANCY IN JULY is a documentary feature film recorded in Strasbourg, at the home of Jean-Luc Nancy on July 3, 2017, belonging to the project by Alfonso Legaz and Andrea Garay 20 MIRRORS HAPPEN. The production of this audiovisual piece takes into consideration the concept of “exposition” one singularity before another (individual, colectivity, town, etc.), a concept deconstructed by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in his book La Communauté désœuvrée (1986 ), in order to deal with the problem of the lack of ontology in documentary film production, as well as the limits of what is “presentable” and what is “not presentable”.

Recordings were made in a single session, without repeating any shots and without interrupting the recording, for which three cameras were used, one fixed and one main mobile, in addition to another backup camera, which provided for the essential stops for the replacement of their respective power sources, and which were coordinated in order to cover the entire physical time with the philosopher. Montage was carried out over three months and the videographic time intentionally approaches the time of the real experience. The two fields of work planned and controlled in the montage phase were time and space.

Time presented (videographic) was established as a reference for the actual duration of the meeting. This raises a criticism of the usual practice in the documentary of substituting or uncritical exchange of real time for a filmic or videographic time based on the pleasure of the visual spectacle, a characteristic element in the aesthetics of aesthetic consensus homogenized and protected by hegemonic power. The dominant physical space, in this case, does not only deal with the home, the territory of the meeting, the intimate space of the philosopher, since the team considers the intimate an unapproachable construction from the outside to that intimacy, treating the concept of “exposition” deconstructed by Nancy, in the same encounter with him and in the visual documentation produced from it. The team treats it from the presented physicality of an itinerated or traveled geography and fictionalized by the visual document: physical displacement of bodies and existences in order to reach Nancy (body-metaphor of knowledge, of the incarnated critical spirit and of the condition of a non-homogenized «us» from the labor conscience of responsibility towards our own): to reach Nancy’s body is to remember his thinking about the body’s common condition: all communication happens at its “limit”, in the limit of the offered body, “exposed”, and nothing allows to cross that limit or appropriate that exposition; the contrary would suppose an attempt of “appropriation by spectacularization”. Audiovisual aesthetics designed to treat cinematographically the body of Nancy offered ironically and insistently focuses on the thought of this impossibility.

NANCY IN JULY, takes into consideration the need to abandon comfort spaces, which range from those provided by the digital infosphere and its electronic means that mean the virtual experience before a monitor as a real social experience, to the main activity of the artists, determined in many cases by a productive space or territory -even expository-, under the control of others, easily interchangeable, interchangeable or lacking in real experience due to the very control of social policies affected by the police of what is meant and distributed, posing in exchange a variant towards the indeterminate spaces of research and learning. NANCY IN JULY deals with the idea handled by Nancy in Finite History (1988), where he urges each one of us to take responsibility not for its inscription in history —or in the discourse that today relieves it—, but in the creation of a “Own historical time” from accepting uncertainty and movement (movement of the body) in pursuit of critical activity itself, which constitutes a transfer -or turn- impregnated with the singular political (dissent), charged with breaking the inertia of the statism, which can only happen in the we as an unlimited partition of that “exposed” singularity.