PATATE
This is the music video of « La Patate », techno track released in summer 2014. The situations generated in this film, which is a performed fiction, are related to a larger reflexion on contemporary war, and on its new mediums and medias of existence.
The footages have been shot in february-march 2014, with a simple DSLR camera, in a cellar somewhere under Strasbourg.
A first version of the audio track is available since 2014, but it’s only 6 years later, august the 3rd 2020, when the film appears.
Initiated by a certain curiosity for category P4 of military discharge (« pyschology level 4 », french equivalent to section eight in US army), the project « P4 » researches connected to « La Patate » aimed to put vectors of terrorism and contemporary forms of war into an absurd and grotesque perspective.
The situations obtained are interpreted under a performative logic, combining the mimicry of both garage culture, tutorial’s medias and terrorism footages. Experiencing a serie of fails, that was dramaturgically and ironically the correct purpose of the team.
Then, I felt the mood to develop a « P4 » tale, in a techno track… and not long after, launching Ableton on my laptop in a coffee shop in Beijing, « La Patate » was being composed.
A few months later, in end 2014, the track is ready and a music video made with the performance filming is about to be released.
Early 2015, wednesday january 7th, a terrorist attack slaughters Charlie Hebdo in Paris, burying the entire France in a state of shock.
All of a sudden, I don’t understand the artistic researches on P4 anymore. It appears that the purpose, comes from nowhere, and doesn’t go anywhere. Paralysed is the word.
May 2020, five years have gone, and so many things have happened and changed my life every day. I’ve recently felt the necessity to check up where I am currently in my life, and after having rescued two couples of Tera bytes from a dead hardrive, I took a deep look on my past, falling back on the « P4 » performance footages.
Strange, but it’s somehow the way now I can understand the « P4 » artistic angle over the topic of war : with the distance. No wonder now « P4 » is one of the project that have helped me the most to understand the mechanism of vision, and what the artist gesture is made of. What I can say about emotions like terror yet, or more exactly, self-censorship because of fearing terrorism, this remastered version of « La Patate » is the expression of it.
ORIGINAL CONCEPT : Pierre-Louis Peny, Arnaud Angoumois, Quentin Juhel, Gabriel Jeanjean
MUSIC : Arno Zhao – La Patate (freekick version)
VIDEO : Arno Zhao
Arno Zhao Prod
2020
