The Scale of Signs

“The worlds calmly turned through in Gabrielle Le Bayon’s “The Scale of Signs” are absent in perhaps more various, complicated ways – history’s vicissitudes condemned to a textbook – technology’s condemn the textbook to nostalgia. Though the protagonist is flicking through the book backwards, meaning that if chronology is presumed, then her sincere desire is time travel, however quaint the notion. This anachronistic book, filled with old-fashioned exotica, reflects the romantic desires of the narrator, who is apparently addressing a poet, that ultimate figure of doomed romance. The voice, however, speaks knowingly, of experience uncontained by representation, of desire outside of the monetary, against norms of a white, European presumption. Le Bayon’s video calmly posits its own heretical movement. A movement, perhaps, that really is nonsadistic: a movement to undo – like reading an old history book backwards.”

Ed Atkins, Open Film 2016, Outpost, Norwich UK