Vincent Meessen
Vita Nova
NEW FILM PRODUCTION by Normal
Vita Nova takes as its point of departure a mythic cover of the French magazine Paris- Match, from 1955. On this cover, a child soldier is depicted in the act of making a military salute. Taking this cover as his cue, the artist weaves together phantoms from the colonial past, the writings of Roland Barthes –who wrote about this particular image in his famous Mythologies – historical facts, reality, and artistic interpretation. The film raises issues that centre on the representation and re-writing of history, its repressed narratives as well as the spectral nature of photography. From Paris to Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), passing by Bingerville (the old capital of the Ivory Coast), the spectator is invited to piece together the fragments of this layered unfolding of events and accounts, as temporalities are dislocated and chronologically disconnected. Drawing on a variety of media and archives, Vincent Meessen creates a parallel and updated story in which a new character is born (Vita Nova) and with him a new narrative. The film gives life to the autobiographical story of a character: Roland Barthes, revisited by the phantom of the colonial. With his new film, Meessen not only brings to the fore repressed or marginalised narratives but also reflects on the artifice that forms part of historiographical discourse, using the fiction of ‘realism’ and the experience of the archive to elaborate his own personal, ‘factual fiction.’