Thierry Fournier | screen-based

Video, 1080p + sound, 30′, 2018-2026

In a static shot facing the Mediterranean Sea, the slightest presence on the horizon triggers an orchestral crescendo, like an unfinished surveillance or rescue. En vigie features the Mediterranean as a space that echoes with all the migrations, their repression and the conflicts that surround it.

The Lookout is presented within the Ososphere Festival in Strasbourg, 2026. It was part of Thierry Fournier’s solo show Machinal, Villa Henry, Nice, from 25 March to 28 April 2018, accompanied by a catalogue with a text by Céline Flécheux and an interview with Isabelle Pellegrini ; and in the group show Fading Away, 22,48 m2 gallery (Paris) curators Céline Flecheux and Rosario Caltabiano, 2018.

Installation: video (12h, 1080p, 16/9, no sound), USB key, LCD screen, steel stand, 170 x 75 x 75 cm, 2017

A screen wonders if the person who observes it is human (“checking you are human….”). It hesitates, it calculates, a wheel turns. Finally, it stops and thanks. Then it starts again, ad infinitum.

Borrowing the language of the captchas, « Just in case » sets up a fictional situation where an apparatus would have become legitimate to detect alone who would be human or not. For a very brief moment, we may think that the screen is actually observing us – besides, does it compute when we are not there? For this entity repeats indefinitely its process, we quickly understand that it plays alone. So, after considering for a brief moment the dystopian hypothesis that a machine could become legitimate to evaluate us, one can continue to watch it, as the uncanny spectacle of an autonomous life form.