C'est comme Être is Patricia & Marie-France Martin's latest video, recently presented at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.  

In the first shots of the video C'est comme Être, two women appear in a strange room.  The lighting, cream tiling and mirrors speak of an imaginary place, dream-like and theatrical.  The lighting is somehow ominous but sensual.  We see the two women in the process of applying cream to their face and arms and apparently ‘getting dressed’.  As the camera moves around the room partially unveiling the space they inhabit, their gestures also take on an erotic and sensual tone.  This tone nevertheless becomes sinister as we see them put on clothes which disguise them and where the meanings for their actions, ‘getting dressed’ is withheld from us. As the two women appear and disappear, then are refracted and multiplied by our glimpses of them through mirrors, they also begin to merge and combine, disguised in camouflage.  As such, images of beauty mutate into ones of terror and opulence: decoration and elegance are replaced by fear.  These twins explore the characteristics of identity.  With insect-like movements, they become one and another in a kaleidoscope of skin designs.  In a kind of malevolent drama, we can find both the erotics and politics of contemporary fears. They have become terrorists of beauty. In this process the images of their dress and bodies merge into abstract patterns that are hallucinating. It is as though by applying a mask, even a feminine mask, they engage in an act of disguise.  Thus, we find ourselves back at the issue to which their works here refer, ‘camouflage’, itself a topic that people often find hallucinating.  The common idea of camouflage as something that conceals, hides or disguises the presence of something, e.g., an insect, butterfly, animal or military equipment, is based on the assumption of mimicry.  In mimicry it is supposed that the object imitates its surrounding environment, so as to ‘fit in’ and hide itself from surrounding prey or potential attackers.  Thus camouflage in nature is assumed to be hiding something; mimicry is conceived as either an offensive or defensive strategy.  But this conception of the function of mimicry as camouflage in nature has been contested.  Roger Caillois noted in ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ (1935) that the literature on animal mimicry and organism metamorphosis made a fundamental mistake in presuming that mimicry as camouflage has any kind of universal explanatory power for all such phenomena.  From the examples of the various biologists, it is also, Callois argues, certainly a mistake to presume that camouflage is even the aim of such mechanisms in nature.  Caillois links some of the strange morphological habits of organisms to copy their surroundings to a kind of crisis in relation to space and identification - which is what he names as legendary psychasthenia. Here there is a disturbance in ‘relations between personality and space’ and Caillios describes this with the image: ‘I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I find myself’.  It is as though space itself is terrorizing and the distinction between the space and an identity is collapsed, or at least their relations become porous.  Returning now to the work of the twins, when we watch the two characters in the video gradually disappear into the material of the space itself, we see this type of assimilation and porous collapse of inside and outside.  The objects in the image and the space of the image merge together.  Such a visual argument makes us feel the disturbance, in a mesmerizing way, of this actual experience.  We thus find ourselves in a spectacle of disguise, which asks us about our own attractions to space.

© David Bate 2003