An Educator and a participant are sitting, on the glamorous red carpet. The smell of glue permeates the space. Philippe Parreno’s installation June 8, 1968 has just been mounted. We arrive in the middle of their conversation.

Educator: … In your view, where is stillness and where is movement in the piece June 8, 1968 by Philippe Parreno?

Participant: Even though we don’t see it in the film, we can imagine all these figures walking silently towards the side of the tracks, walking towards the corpse of Robert Kennedy, soon to arrive, soon to disappear, carried by the train. The figures are not passive, their stillness is a ‘thereness’, they are ‘there’, waiting for the dead presence to come to them. They are in a relation of devotion to it,  in the here-and-now of the moment. Some figures are more sensitive than others; petrified, facing the horror of the assassinated body, but also open to care for it, bravely to let it pass through their flesh — shivering cold — and they then keep a trace of it, within their own, suddenly more heavy, bodies.

Educator: Many visitors would not agree that all this is going on within those figures. Many just think the figures are immobilized, like statues, expressionless, strange. They are not crying, not breaking down, not carefully putting flowers on the side of the tracks, not hiding their eyes with their shaking hands, neither are they clenching their fists in despair and sorrow… No, just this strange stillness… — But strange is good, right? By making the figures so strangely still, Parreno makes us very aware of the quality of this posture, makes us pause and think… maybe… that without this stillness there is no movement.

Participant: Yes… in Parreno’s film installation the figures are firmly rooted in the ground, connected to an animated, breathing kind of nature: the wind is a force, sometimes gently murmuring within high grass, sometimes rushing with intensity through the trees. Water is a force as well, so close, almost inaudibly rippling on the side of a small boat, where a lone young girl sits, quiet and meditative. And this huge warm sunshine shimmering, a real hope on this day of mourning, creates pink and yellow flares in the camera’s eye.

Marie-Hélène Lemaire
DHC/ART Education

Photo: Philippe Parreno, June 8, 1968 (2009). Richard-Max Tremblay, with the permission of DHC/ART.