Video filmed for the Parisian art event Nuit Blanche 2002, invited by Emmy de Martelaere.

The video was filmed at night, when nobody was in the building and the offices were empty, at the Hôtel d’Albret, Direction des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Paris.

One can make someone out, in the black and white images, exploring the empty building, its corridors, rooms, staircases, and from time to time a hand appears in the image, groping, so that we begin to understand that the person filming is the one wandering around the space. We realize that he’s using the “nightshot” function of the camcorder (a function allowing one to film at night, thanks to infrared light which is invisible to the eye) to orient himself, and that he’s exploring the dark building using just the LCD screen as a light source. We follow the person, attracted by what this “subjective camera” discovers, in an atmosphere resembling a crime thriller. It reminds one of Hitchcock and the suspense of films such as Strangers on a Train.

The hand explores, roams across doors, walls, furniture. We follow. Through corridors and rooms, the camera looks aside, through a window, passes a door, climbs a staircase. Wandering. Intrusion.

Finally, in the last room ...

Jakob Gautel, Mai 2002

A second version of the video was filmed in Berlin, when I was invited by the festival Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, in 2003, by Jean-François Rettig and Nathalie Hénon.