“El inestable balance de la realidad” (2002) offers a detailed reading of the socio-economic implications of White Balance (2002), a work in video by François Bucher (b. 1972), on the basis of the critical ideological commentaries that the work itself contains. Roca views Twin Murders (1999) [see doc. no. 1133884], a work exhibited at the Alliance Française in Bogotá, as the theoretical-practical precedent for White Balance. The two works evidence the irreality of creative strategies used to produce visual languages and the notions of the double and the copy as central themes in Bucher’s art.
The article views the images in the video as representations that reveal the norms governing the hegemonic visual language operative in what José Ignacio Roca (b. 1962) sees as four situations resulting from the (ab) use of the tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York as media spectacle. Roca refers specifically to new “racial profiling” techniques, policies of discipline and punishment, censorship justified by the notion of “collateral damage,” and the definition of “terrorism” according to who performs it. These are the cornerstones of a thorough analysis of the video White Balance envisioned as balance within “commonsense” or protest against the “delegitimization” of alternative narratives at the hand of hegemonic white power. While in this article Roca does not explicitly define Bucher’s work as a critical exercise on the conformation of visual language, that argument is implicit in how the text is constructed. The pertinent and profound socio-political commentaries in the text enrich the reading of Bucher’s work.
José Ignacio Roca is a Colombian curator and critic. His curatorial projects include Fantasmagoría (2007?2009) and Traces of Friday (2003). He co-curated the XXVII São PauloBiennial (Brazil, 2006). From 2002 to 2008, he was the general director of the Banco de la República’s visual arts division. At present (2010), he is the artistic director of Philagrafika, a print triennial held in a number of venues in Philadelphia in 2010.
Colombian artist and writer François Bucher has a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de los Andes and a master’s in film from the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2004, his work was awarded first prize by the MUSAC and Casa de América for Ibero-American Video Creation, and the Werkleitz Award at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin (Germany). At present (2010), he lives and work in Berlin and Bogotá.