Pay-Less Monument

Thomas Edison’s laboratory, a former military base, the premises of a ufology association… In these different venues, orators extol the American genius and spirit of conquest, with the consummate art of storytelling. But Pay-Less Monument tells its story as much in the interstices separating each sequence as in the sequences themselves. All of the places of memory and fantasy that we discover are, in some way, “discount” monuments, like the cheap gravestones referred to in the film title. All are located in New Jersey, an intrinsically peripheral state wedged between New York and Philadelphia. Through the almost mythological stories they tell, its residents seem to be trying to claim a place in national history: the history of scientific progress, historical events, life sciences (dinosaur bones have been found here), and even of the universe (a plaque explains that a jumbled heap of metal was formerly an antenna that found traces of the Big Bang). Faced with these discourses, minerals often serve as a leitmotif and impassive witness. Théodora Barat’s images repeatedly return to the moment when the inert bursts into light, be it Edison’s light bulbs, fluorescent minerals under ultraviolet light or nuclear bombs… Between humans’ biased discourse and a timeless mineral presence, a text by Robert Smithson forges links: surely, the semi-urban landscape of New Jersey, with its large bay-windowed buildings, displays crystalline qualities?

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian