2023-05-01 09:45:43
For the first time, the Center Pompidou is offering an augmented reality installation. We go back to this installation in the heart of Alabama in the 1950s. This is the story of the first black woman to refuse the laws of racial segregation before Rosa Parks. ” Black. The unknown life of Claudette Colvin”, is the name of this installation.
We are exactly March 2, 1955: Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old girl, refuses to give up her place on the bus to a white woman in segregationist America. Nine months later, Rosa Parks reiterates this gesture and becomes an icon of the black cause… But Colvin, sinks into oblivion. Thus, Tania de Montaigne has looked into the story of the young Claudette and brings it to life in an augmented reality installation which, as its name suggests, consists of adding virtual elements to the real decor: holograms, images and sounds.
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An immersion of the senses on site
We are immersed thanks to the process of augmented reality in the daily life of Claudette Colvin. We are in the bus by her side, in court with her facing the judge who condemns her. There are also the rebellion scenes of the Blacks afterwards, who boycott the buses, the harangues of Martin Luther King… Pierre-Alain Giraud produced these scenes with highly technological processes: “ They are real actors that we film in studios, with a green screen and 58 cameras, there, around them, alone. So afterwards, we had to recompose the scenes, and we were going to shoot in a special studio in Taiwan, with actors we found in Taiwan as well. Claudette, who is the embodiment of this character, is a young Ugandan who was studying in Taiwan. So, here we are, we had to work there and create a new form. »
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“Making the collective”
A new form that requires a large production. But why this choice of augmented reality? ” A virtual film would not have interested me, explains Tania de Montaigne. I’m not interested in people putting on headphones, experiencing something, and then saying, “That was before, but me, it’s very different“. What interested me, there, is that we take reality and increase it. We increase it because in fact the human relationship is only augmented reality. I’m taking your story and adding it to mine, and now I’m going to work differently. For me, this object was relevant. It’s how we can remake the collective. And the collective is made when I accept that someone else’s story is mine too. »
Thus, in groups of ten visitors, this installation offers an immersion in the life of the black activist for 30 minutes. A way to experience segregation and racism from within and certainly to better feel its injustice.
” Black. The unknown life of Claudette Colvin An augmented reality installation until May 29 at the Center Pompidou in Paris.
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