March 5th 1982 takes the shape of a book entitled Germania, a history from the nineteen seventies, an archive Liberation newspaper from March 5th 1982, and a 1:35 scale concrete structure in a mock salon setting. The Liberation from March 5th 1982 is presented in a two way frame where the recto/verso of the newspaper layout can be seen juxtaposed on one another. The newspaper itself contains articles that includes the announcements of two separate deaths. One of Phillip K. Dick, American science fiction writer, and the death of Georges Perec, a French writer, member of the Oulipo, known in his grammatical de-constuction that provide the principal structure in his writing. The book Germania in the exhibition, is edited and disposed in the exhibition space to be read. It is a throw back to the original text Les choses by Georges Perec. In it Germania slips into an uchronia where the context, temporality and character names were changed. It describes a young couple in Berlin, in the victorious Nazi empire during the seventies. This uchronia is a reintrepretation of the book, The Man in the High Castle by Phillip.K Dick. The 1:35 scale concrete sculpture was based on the «Schwerbelastungskoerper» architectural diorama built by Albert Speer in 1941 to probe the resistance of the sandy soil of the city of Berlin. where architect Albert Speer produced several archectural structures for the Third Reich’s Germania Project. The «Schwerbelastungskörper» (heavy load-bearing body) is a large concrete cylinder built to study the feasibility of constructing a massive ‘arch de triomphe’ on the site. Some experts now believe that this «new Berlin» would have collapsed in the seventies. However, the scale model sculpture in the installation acts as a new fictional point of entry to the new Germania narrative.

View of the show 5 MARS 1982

Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, 2012