laterpost 1995. Philippe Parreno

Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation detail at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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Snow Dancing, 1995
installation view at Le Consortium, Dijon

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excerps from Snow Dancing (1995), screenshots from http://www.liamgillick.info/home/texts/maybe-it-would-be-better-to-work-in-groups-of-three on August 20, 2018
images © wfw

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Snow Dancing (1995) started with the publication of a book in which I described a promotional event, a kind of party or festival. The reading time of the text was about the same as the event itself. So the book was a score that was performed in Le Consortium in Dijon. I transformed the exhibition space that hosted the party, and this time-based architecture became the exhibition – people were invited to visit an architecture produced by a party. So the book was a score that produced a space. – Team Spirit: PHILIPPE PARRENO  in conversation with TOM MORTON , Frieze Magazine, 2004

In late 1994 PHILIPPE PARRENO dictated to LIAM GILLICK and JACK WENDLER a description of a party that had not yet occured. Snow Dancing, published in 1995 by GW Press and long out of print, is a record of his original conversation and the party it described. At the Consortium in Dijon two months later, hundreds of people were invited to participate in a promotional event that played out PARRENO’s earlier description.

During the event prior to the inauguration, visitors could get a special pair of shoes with carved soles. Wearing those shoes, they had access to a space whose floor was covered with smooth material, on which the soles were printing words. Afterwards, the footprints were casted in glass. These transparent objects are like the ghosts of past exhibitions held in other places and come to haunt a space without a history which will literally be discovered through them.

The text is a loosely scripted scenario providing the outline of a situation or sequence of events to be produced: notably, the party and subsequent exhibition at Le Consortium.2 As scenarios go, it is a peculiar examplar. Neglecting the scene-by-scene action that defines the genre, the text conjures up something more atmospheric and static, in between environment and situation. Essentially an extended stage direction, it describes in great detail a world where the design of the social environment and related questions of self-styling play a major role. But these details are not simply descriptive: they could also be seen to indicate a particular type of activity or action. To insist that this never-filmed, never-projected, design-obsessed text, social event and exhibition is still a ”film” is to associate design itself with a certain machinic or mediatic logic. – On Snow Dancing, Ina Blom for e-flux, October 2016

Snow Dancing by PHILIPPE PARRENO took place at Le Consortium, Dijon from January 20, 1995 to March 8, 2015.

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