Le Pont Marie

“I construct my world with the help of many small particles. I am one of those who research, add, create connections, and other combinations.“ (Edmund Kuppel, 2007) [1]

Two monitors stand back to back on the floor. Both monitors show a video recording of the Pont Marie bridge, which has forded the Seine River in Paris since the 17th century. One shot shows Pont Marie’s arches from the southeast, the other shows them from the northwest. The Seine appears to be flowing into the interior of the screen of the front monitor and out of the depths of the rear monitor. The tourist boats also disappear into the front screen, only to reappear on the rear one. Viewers who want to follow their passage are eventually obliged to move and go to the other side of the monitors.

Kuppel superimposes image and real space and makes the perception of reality appear fragmentary. Does the boat really come out on the rear side of the filmed bridge, or is it actually a media fiction? So can we trust this film medium at all? Edmund Kuppel’s work is a constant reminder that our idea of an objective, supratemporal reality is a changing construct. Rather, it is the viewer moving in space who continually produces new versions of reality – if the conditions change, so does the entire system.



[1] Edmund Kuppel, artist talk with Didier Mathieu, 2007–2008, in Peter Weibel, ed., »Edmund Kuppel: Projections 1970–2010, Sprawling Fields of Vision« (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 18.