Universes Undone

“It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem.”¹  – Philip K. Dick, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

In 1978, sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick wrote a short essay on fictive universes and subjective realities. Mindful of the authoritarian power of fiction and imagination, he set forth to expound on the danger of spurious realities manufactured by the media, governments, and other interest groups in order to exercise control over mass behavior and perception. He pictured a potential future where communities and individuals no longer had the ability to acknowledge or comprehend realities beyond those that they have been exposed to, leading to a communication breakdown within society. Four decades after this insightful piece was written, the way our world is mediated, represented, and simulated through technology and media has become much more intricate, while the mechanisms beyond what we can see are also much more abstruse. Not unlike Dick’s own craft, artist and film-maker, Neïl Beloufa has been creating micro-universes through his work, as a way to scrutinise commonly accepted ideologies and suppositions that uphold what we understand as reality. In Beloufa’s eyes, these representations pervade our everyday experience like propaganda through newspapers, advertisements, and screens². They are presented to us no longer as autonomous individuals, but rather as viewers and consumers.

As an artist who firmly believes that his job is to represent society, Beloufa seeks to critique the complex network and systems of power. Moreover, while doing so, he also acknowledges his position, as well as the risks of legitimising the said values or positions he questions, within the worlds he appropriates. Contained within his films and installations, Beloufa’s fictive universes are well-composed layers filled to the rim with nuances, where meaning and positions of power are constantly fluid and in contradiction with each other. His deliberately fragmented scenarios are derived from, and regularly made in collaboration with, a cast of real and fictitious characters. Examples include suburban teenagers in France for Vengeance (2014) and real cowboys and gangsters in Los Angeles in Tonight and the People (2013). Additionally, these scenarios explore the manifestations of cultural hegemony at work. Throughout this process, Beloufa lays bare the ways in which power is acquired and expressed within politics, technology, lifestyle choices, celebrity culture and identity politics. One by one, façades are dismantled under his laborious and impish treatment. His caricatured subjects find themselves in behavioural loops, where everyone is caught in an impasse and the situation implodes. Calling to mind Dick’s analogy of building universes and having them fall apart, Beloufa’s creative and destructive act embodies his process of unpacking the asymmetries of power concealed by the deft strategies of control.

“I like when things get stuck, when there is something to unblock. As soon as it fits in, I need to move on”.³  – Neïl Beloufa

“Devotees of reality leave all this as it is; they go walking in it, as it were – they « live it ». They seem to accept it, or at any rate never raise a voice of protest against it.”⁴  –  Hans Belting and Alexander Kluge in Conversation, ‘The face cannot be captured by images’

As a discerning observer of the way images have a grip on contemporary life and imagination, Beloufa’s efforts to decrypt the mechanisms of media culture is not limited to laying bare these structures through replication. He also draws focus on the people who are, ultimately, the nodes of reception and distribution of his meticulous communication chain. When planning his first feature-length film, Tonight and the People (2013), Beloufa sent out a casting call in Los Angeles for roles – namely, cowboys, gangsters, political activists, hippies and teenagers – which could be regarded as a microcosm of America seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Surprisingly, some of those who auditioned were amateur actors who wanted to play a screen version of themselves in real life, forming a strange cycle of self-identification and typecasting where life imitates art, or, one might argue for Beloufa’s purpose, where art imitates life. The script and character treatments were gleaned from these auditions and they created a patchwork of timeworn American stereotypes caught between reality and fantasy. The film’s motley crew of characters all appear to be whiling away in their own natural surroundings as they prepare for a massive, life-changing event that same evening; wealthy teenage girls gossip while getting ready for a night out and two sets of small-time Latino and black gangsters flirt with the cute young waitress in the drive-in, their exaggerated machismo on full display.

For most of the film, the various characters wax lyrical about their philosophies and ambitions, and their self-indulgent platitudes sound all the more unseemly when juxtaposed with the kitsch and flat Western- and sitcom-inspired film set. As the storyline progresses, we begin to discover that the idealistic characters are all bark and no bite: the cowboy explains to his son the reason why he is not a real cowboy (he did not want to kill anyone), while political activists in a group session caution a fellow black activist – whose urgent rally speech zeroes in on class and racial injustice as the root of the country’s political problems – that bringing such rhetorics back into the political equation will do nothing to change the state of affairs. “America is founded on dreams, not class,” they remind him. All trapped in a junkyard of unrealised dreams, their chance comes after daybreak. Most of humanity is wiped out by the apocalypse, and for those who are left standing, a brave world of possibilities awaits. For once, their dreamed future is real and palpable, but in true Beloufian fashion, this dissipates quickly into a heated debate about whether they should forsake values and frameworks of the past and imagine new systems. Failing to mobilise a path into the unknown, they find themselves heading towards where they left off, a society where banks dominate, organic food is all the rage, and ideals are expressed rather than put into action. Tonight and the People is an uncanny parody of the democratic zeitgeist, banally retold in the same stale rhetoric, mannerisms and aesthetics of a typified world and cultural genres. How can one imagine alternative futures in a world saturated with consummated dreams designed for mass consumption? The irony of Beloufa’s meta-reality is not lost on us. It is a cautionary tale of a dystopian world caught in its own neoliberal fantasy.

During my studio visit with Beloufa he spoke strikingly about his belief that imagination is the most potent power in a time encumbered by the immense lack of it. Out of his catalogue of films, the realm of imagination is perhaps explored to its fullest extent as a device of subversion in his debut Kempinski (2007). Conceived as a documentary when he was still a student, here Beloufa invited Malians living near Bamako to speak about the future in the present tense. The future-cum-reality they articulated no longer adhered to the image of Africa as a land of technological backwardness, but as a fantastic portrayal of a highly advanced society where physical intimacy happens telepathically, and ideas, objects and bodies move at sonic and light speed. Under the hues of neon lights, their physical reality recedes into the darkness of the night and their powerful imaginations are described and shared in the company of their community. A contrast to Tonight and the People, the tales in this pseudo-sci-fi exemplify how imagination could be harnessed by individuals as a transformative tool to disrupt power hierarchies underlined by Western popular culture and their imagination of the Other within the parameters established by Beloufa.

Yet, one cannot overlook the power Beloufa yields (and acknowledges) as the mastermind of these fictive worlds and self-generative systems, in spite of the fluid and collaborative methodology he adopts with those involved in his projects. Indeed the artist himself has no trouble problematising it. One such instance of the dynamic struggle of control and authorship between Beloufa and his subjects plays out in Vengeance (2014), the outcome of an invitation to work with a group of difficult high school teens from a Parisian suburb. Instead of instrumentalising these students, he practised a laissez-faire approach, asking the students to collectively work on a story they wished to tell, with the intention of lending his artistic and filmmaking skills to help materialise their narrative. What they came up with was a telenovela involving a love-triangle between the self-obsessed Cristiano Ronaldo, his neglected fiancée, Amira, and the romantic wrestler Rey Mysterio, all played by Beloufa’s studio staff. Along with Ronaldo’s treasured robot, the plot unfolds across a world of private jets, fast cars, luxury homes and gyms, and is staged using makeshift materials in the school. However, tensions arise when the students disagree with Beloufa on elements of the film, such as Ronaldo’s favourite food, to be served by Tokay the robot. The students reject Beloufa’s suggestion of a banana, and insist on using popcorn which for them is what Hollywood actors eat on screen, and eventually the class dissents and loses interest. With the class turned against him, Beloufa takes the helm and finishes the piece with a computer-simulated English voice-over atop the original French narration and discussion with the students, arguments included.

Foretold by the work’s title, retribution takes place both on- and off-screen because of a betrayal. The latter is the consequence of the breakdown of Beloufa’s self-imposed position of neutrality in a democratic framework within a social economic reality – the majority of the suburban students are from former French colonies – in which a deviant fantasy outside popular cultural representations has little currency. It is the triumph of Hollywood’s indoctrination over the imagination of the contemporary youth. In the end, the youth can opt out of his universe due to creative differences, but the artwork has to go on. And while Beloufa is at it, he chooses to display everything in his final artwork, setbacks included.

« A paradoxical situation arises when a museum predicated on producing and marketing visibility can itself not be show – the labour performed there is just as publicly invisible as that of any sausage factory. »⁵  – Hito Steyerl, Is a Museum a Factory?

Beloufa’s quest to dismantle structures of visual and ideological production and the societal structures they bolster, is essentially a pursuit of autonomy from the forces of economic and political control. Invisible to the audience, he has been working adamantly towards creating a space of emancipation and support for his studio and those who assist his productions. To this end, in 2015, he puts this system to the test by moving the studio to an abandoned packaging factory in Villejuif, in the outskirts of Paris, to work on the self-financed film project Occidental (2016). For the full-length feature, Beloufa’s team meticulously constructed a hotel set out of MDF from scratch with stylistic references to hotels of the ‘70s, and began filming this self-initiated project with no destination for its presentation in mind. In line with Kempinski’s critique of the West’s exorcising gaze of the non-West, the title refers to the first hotel chain in the world – the film’s story takes place within the Hotel Occidental and is a nod to the heyday of pre-Airbnb mass tourism, where cultural imperialism took shape in the form of majestically-named resorts and hotel chains all over the world. The plot centres on a high-stakes game between the hotel’s suspicious guests—two fake Italians, a British bachelor party and others, alongside the watchful hotel staff—set in a neutral yet politically-charged space. A protest is raging outside, while inside a different power play of paranoia and control unfolds in a high-octane thriller slash black comedy in a post-colonial society of surveillance and racial politics.

After shooting wrapped, Beloufa repurposed the film set and the adjacent white cube space into a contemporary art space, Occidental Temporary, opening it as an alternative exhibition venue for a community of artists he shares affinities with. By funding it independently from his own resources, Beloufa played the system and carved out an autonomous and elusive laboratory of ideas and strategies. In other words, by way of sidestepping commercial and institutional frameworks, he shifted the contemporary art system’s conventional conditions of production and distribution. He also released Occidental through the film circuit, outside of his familiar terrain of contemporary art, and all the while the exhibitions on view served the artists rather than the system. When he realised after two years that 80% of the funds spent on the enterprise went to renting the space and not into supporting the artists showing there, he decided, in line with the namesake of the initiative, to conclude things. Even though economics is not his strong suit, under the auspices of Occidental Temporary Beloufa enacted his experimental vision of economic equity and support within the art world outside the confines of his oeuvre.

“Any proxy creates a mess – that is the rule. It destabilizes existing orders and dichotomies, undermines fixed structures, just to open a door for humans, packages, or messages to pass. The proxy creates its own temporary world of intervention.”⁷  – Boaz Levin and Vera Tollman, Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age

Neïl Beloufa has a lot to say about ‘the enemy.’ “It is efficient, is industrial, is communicative, is designed. It’s something that you don’t think about when you use it—that’s my enemy.”⁸ The realm that best captures these prevailing forces of communication by design is the Internet. It is noteworthy that this is the very same field of totalising democracy which resonates with Beloufa’s working method of a non-hierarchical arrangement of interests, positions and objects. This also explains his incessant exploration of the impact of the Internet—in particular regarding simulation of transparency and intimacy as well as the accelerated circulation of images and data—on our perception of the world and with one another. For his second solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo this year, entitled The Enemy of My Enemy, he took up the colossal task of setting his works alongside a selection of other artists’ work of a similar affinity within a curated encyclopaedia of historical events with contradicting themes of politics, artworks, documents and artefacts. Aggressive and inimical in its gesture, the exhibition consists of a complex scenography of collages and miniature dioramas on mobile pedestals, clusters of newspaper headlines, props, museum collections and news footage under keywords such as necrorealism, communication, public space, empathy, and destruction. They were shown in conjunction with tragedies of wars, oppression, dictatorships and injustices in our recent history with the aim of exposing the grim realities of our world. The amplified overload of recycled and appropriated information, all part of the mechanisms of communication and propaganda, seem to put its veracity, and manipulative power to the test. Simultaneously, Beloufa’s system of ‘roaming cenotaphs’ were programmed to move in multifarious ways according to an algorithm. This was to initiate unexpected combinations and unhinge conventional association of ideologies and perspectives within this life-size board game, consequently evoking an image of a self-generative factory of human misery. The overwhelming discomfort imbued in the polarised standpoints can be seen as particularly pertinent in the pessimism and helplessness of the current political climate. The display urgently reminds us of the present state of the world and how we got here, in case we dare forget.

With an excess of reality around us, where does art stand within this overview that Beloufa produces heavy-handedly in the form of a proxy in his exhibition? What is the role of the artist in times of political turmoil? Rarely has he dealt with these questions head on, and for this exhibition he sets art alongside reality as the means to reveal the radical differences in our authority figures’ ability to instrumentalise art and everyday imagery to suit its propagandist agenda. Within Beloufa’s framework, art becomes a field of speculation and of commentary and political action. A teaser of the near future, the exhibition opens with a selection of Beloufa’s works conjuring a paradoxical world of idyllic surveillance (People’s passion…) and boardroom meetings of warmongering nations (World Domination), accompanied by anomalous proto-industrial phyto-pods, thrusting the audience into bleak visions of a world where everything we can imagine goes wrong. Parallel to the world of current affairs, he dives into art history to cite historical positions and works of artists such as realist painter Gustave Courbet – enfant terrible and part of the Paris Commune known for his idiosyncratic anarchism –; Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Stalin; and Joseph Beuys’ video performance of anti-Reagan song Sonne statt Reagan and to his contemporaries such as Hito Steyerl, Thomas Hirschhorn and Pope.L. Antipodal to Beloufa’s fuse of fiction and reality, these artists respond to, and appropriate reality into, autonomous works that repudiate instrumentalisation which become tools of the artist’s own propaganda. When shown alongside the chaotic simulacra of images and symbols of power, these antagonistic pockets are individual reminders of the capability of art and images as resistance. Unequivocally, the exhibition is redolent of Beloufa’s method of editing and amalgamating fragments into a representation of the world, and, via his aggrandising process, these images of power are exhausted and rendered into pure form, stripped of context and content. Recalling what Beloufa told me how he thought exhibitions are like crime scene investigations, apart from functioning as a proxy of our state of affairs, The Enemy of My Enemy could also be regarded as an exhibition of ruins of a dismal world falling apart at its seams. Under Beloufa’s orchestration, our wretched reality is unglued for an instant, and almost like the characters of all his films, all we can do is be confronted by this universe as it is being undone, hoping against hope to find a way out.