June 16 to September 14, 2025

A project by Alexandre Bouffard

Polymer dispersed liquid crystal film, vinyl, MDF, rubber, and galvanized steel

Idle still

The tension at play in the photographic montage between several angles of optical capture is taken as a starting point: that of the photographer, on the move in a car, and that of fixed security cameras, aimed at billboards. This tension raises questions: who is the subject, and who is the object of this staging? Who is the bearer of agency and constructor of meaning? Who produces the image, and what exactly is the image in question? There’s no clear-cut answer. Is the photographer reduced to only being the object of the advertisement, as a targeted driver? Does the image he produces merely replicate the original advertisement? Might it be the image itself that ultimately produces the photographic subject? Or does his photographic gesture enable him to extricate himself from the initially assigned role?

The spider, a predatory figure, expresses this tension: the predator is also, in a way, the object of the hunt, since its survival depends on the existence of its prey. The following text unpacks this dynamic of reciprocal gazes — between what looks and what is seen, what captures and what is captured — a dynamic found, among other things, in the animal, human and photographic gaze. This idea is extended to the exhibition object, which is both self-contained and open to the outside world, particularly through the ephemeral and ambivalent relationship it seeks to establish with passers-by.

Whoever is tasked with bringing possibility out from what is closing in on itself also bears the responsibility of preserving from collapse everything that participates in this task: subject and object alike.

The second principle of thermodynamics is a formal, depersonalized expression of this. When a system closes in on itself, the energy invested in it dissipates, increasing disorder until the system finally collapses.

We must introduce something new into the situation, otherwise we risk binding ourselves to a movement of definitive closure and losing all possibility, including the possibility of movement in general.

All movement, at first an impulse towards something, is under the constant threat of collapse.

This risk characterizes idleness, which is a potential impulse: always awaiting something, one who abandons themself to idleness can never be certain that they won’t dissolve into it entirely.

***

A similar tension is found in the hunt, particularly in the anxiety that grips the predator. As they wait, lying idle, the predator’s fear is the same as that of their prey. Faced with the impossibility of living without this other — being heteronomous, in short — the predator cannot quite claim the role of a fully-fledged subject, of an autonomous agent. They are not the prime mover of the hunt. Always, from impulse, they are captured by the fear of collapse and the vital need to escape it.

***

The process of inquiry, of research, could be seen as a sublimated, pacified form of the hunt, one in which the anxiety of the investigating subject is only resolved at the moment of closure — of capture — of a set of signs.

Closure puts an end to both the investigation and the object that resisted it. At its core, it exhausts the possibilities that this movement deployed. The investigator seeks to gather and hoard everything that seems necessary to resolve a perceived lack. The need to fill this gap risks dragging the investigation back into the brutality of the hunt.

At first, we are inclined to see the investigation as a rationalized, pacified version of predation. However, in its extreme, such as the hunt of a fugitive, it reverts to its violent, impulsive form. Just when we thought the investigation had freed itself from the brutality of the hunt, its final aim is revealed to be the capture of a prey, evoking the equivocal notion of the “culprit.” At this point, the investigation no longer seeks understanding, but to target and capture.

However, if we accept that investigation is a provisionally sublimated form of the hunt, then the hint can be seen as marking an exit from the paradigm of predation and appropriation. In this case, the hint is a sign whose referent remains open because it indicates the probable, or even the possible. A hint is a sign that points in several directions at once, inviting interpretation rather than grasp.

Where the prey appears to the predator only as a signal that triggers a reflex action, the hint opens an indeterminate perspective that defers the moment of closure, of capture.

The movement of the investigating subject — drawn toward the hint and venturing to branch off in one of the directions it inspires — is not captured but temporarily freed from the anxiety that once inhabited it. The web of hints woven by this subject postpones and delays the moment of closure, stretching it out indefinitely.

The hint is thus the antithesis of capture, insofar as it is the very measure, the point around which the movement of the investigation revolves. The investigator no longer seeks to seize an object, a prey, but to bifurcate, following the course of the hint until they escape from oneself.

***

Seeking an answer to such a problem in the form of an object that, while remaining sealed, gives itself to view without resisting the gaze — the instant of a blink, the gaze absorbed into the photographic lens — places us at the intersection of transparency and opacity.

We would then like to be in a position where we can see the thing itself without being overwhelmed by anxiety, a position where the distinction between inside and outside is abolished. Idleness could then be understood both as waiting and as resting.

Yet, as we approach such an object, we are captured. All that once gestured, like a promise, toward an outside, a form of plenitude, now closes in on itself—or on us; from this moment, it is one and the same.

In the collapse, however, as we offer ourselves up to capture, there remains the illusion of a first image, one that whispers to us: if, from one point of view, I was not already the object of a capture, then… we would remain indefinitely waiting, at rest.

The task of those who give in to the hint could be summed up as follows: to abolish the reign of predation. Yet, faced with the contingency of the traces available to them — be it a crowd, its glances, its noises — there is no guarantee that the subject, who in anxious expectation hopes that their own gaze will be returned to them, and that they will perhaps find reprieve from relentless pursuit, is not already the object of capture, of collapse.

Translated by Gautier Lemelin and David McDuff Boxer.