Maalbeek

The adage, contradictory or even comical, says that memory is a faculty that forgets. And yet, the infinite meanders of memory are indeed mysterious and often of a very relative reliability. With Maalbeek, Ismael Joffroy Chandoutis pushes the exploration of this fascinating paradox to its furthest limits with an extraordinary assemblage, both poetic and experimental, of absolutely terrible visual and sound testimonies of the explosion that occurred at the Maalbeek metro station in Brussels in 2016. Making his own the fluctuating quality of the images collected from various sources (photos, newspaper articles, TV reports, surveillance camera excerpts, videos shot on iPhone, original filming, etc.), Chandoutis manipulates the grain, the texture, the pixels, creating ghostly images, which seem to disintegrate while revealing shadows and imprecise shapes that our eye is biologically programmed to identify as human. The narrator, one of the victims of the attack, searches for herself in all these images, a head injury having caused memory lost. She tries to understand and tame this pivotal moment in her life, which has left a gaping hole in her memories. The result of this collage is a masterful reflection, avoiding all sensationalism and sentimentality, on the troubling double importance of memory and oblivion, but also on the place, the power and the disconcerting truth of the omnipresent images of our contemporary world.
 

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer