While in Paris, I explored the galleries in the Marais situated within the 3rd and 4th arrondissement. After talking to the women working at the Gagosian Gallery, they recommended the Marian Goodman gallery, a favorite gallery within the Paris art industry.
For his solo show, O Sentimental Machine, William Kentridge found inspiration from a piece of found footage of Leon Trotsky, Marxist theorist and Soviet Politician, giving a speech in response to being exiled from Turkey. From this piece of found footage, Kentridge made a five-channel video installation in the basement level of the gallery with accompanying drawings on the ground floor. These drawings in a sense represented Kentridge’s attachment and emotional exile from Paris in relation to Trotsky’s exile from Turkey.
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Before the film began, the directors explained the decision-making process. Throughout the story we were given checkpoints with two choices on how the story would unfold. We had to democratically and collectively decide which choice to make. The legitimacy of the democratic process can be argued since the directors still had the primary power over the process and made the executive decisions over the progression of choices. This point, however, supports the primary thesis of the film: the interactions between the audience and the directors, the roles each audience member inferentially plays, and the debates between audience members reflect the same social dynamics which take place during actual protests. One definitive choice the directors made to counter the reality of an apparent power hierarchy within protests was to give priority to femmes and people of color during discussions. The directors also explained if people feel they can easily speak up in crowds, they should give room to people who find it difficult to speak. Concurrently, people who find it difficult to speak in large crowds should challenge themselves and make choices for the audience. Once the rules were set, the directors prefaced the start of the film and said there is “no way back from the chaos.” Then the film began.