Risques du metier (2000)

Handling

Commissioned for the Purple Magazine-curated 'Elysian Fields' exhibition at the Pompidou Center, Occupational Hazards (Les Risques du Métier) arose from a fundamental constraint. For budget, insurance, and scheduling reasons, filming was to be kept within the Pompidou Center itself, using the institution's own media production crew, whose normal job is to document exhibitions, openings, lectures, and other museum events. The star architecture of the Rogers-Piano building, with interiors recently renovated in a bland euro-corporate space-age vernacular, became the generator of a Perecian house-constructed fiction. The locations were basic narrative units, as the spaces of the Pompidou went looking for other fictions besides their design, function, or security.