Rencontres d’Arles 2024 : Debi Cornwall : Model Citizens

One of the most striking exhibitions at this year’s Rencontres d’Arles was the presentation co-produced with Photo Elysée of Debi Cornwall’s exploration of the staging of militarized power and what it means to be a ‘model citizen’ in such societies. Zoé Isle de Beauchaine met the photographer at Espace Monoprix.

Zoé Isle de Beauchaine: This exhibition and accompanying book (published in English and French by Radius Books and Textuel) follows the Prix Élysée you won in 2023. How did the project come about?

Debi Cornwall: The idea for Model citizens appeared from my 2020 book The necessary fictions, which can also be seen in this exhibition. I have been interested in the staging of American power in all my work and increasingly in the performance of citizenship. These are two sides of the same coin. Traditionally, it has focused on how state power works on us, and now I am thinking about how performative fictions manage difficult truths in civil society, for example in museum installations and social life, as well as in Rally series : we are not just passive beings who consume government propaganda. We also use fictions, plays, simulation for our own purposes to understand our different realities.

You come from a background as a civil rights lawyer and turned to photography ten years ago. Did you embrace a conceptual documentary practice focused on these questions early on?

DC: Yes and no. At university I took some photography classes. I interned for Mary Ellen Mark and thought I would like to be a social documentary photographer. That was in the mid 90’s. Analog, black and white… I didn’t know what a workout could look like. However, I didn’t get the newspaper job I applied for when I graduated college, so life took a very different turn. But when I came back from practicing as a lawyer who used individual cases as a means of exposing systemic injustice, that legal training, that way of working and researching and thinking, came very much to inform the way in which I also made the visual work. like how I think about what images can accomplish, the kinds of conversations they can spark.

The exhibit features various training sites for military purposes, from wars in the Middle East to the United States Border Patrol Academy in New Mexico. Can you tell us more about these ?

DC: The first of these locations is from The necessary fictions, my 2020 photo book in which I documented the fictional country of Atropia, which only exists on US military bases across the country. The simulated Afghan and Iraqi village sets are built to evoke the sights, sounds and even smells of the original villages for soldiers preparing to deploy. These sites are also populated by civilians who act as “cultural role players. » They are often naturalized US citizens, fluent in Arabic and other relevant languages. They came to the United States, some of them even fleeing the war, only to dress up and act out versions of their past lives in the US military. And that’s what they get paid for, it’s a job. Similarly, at the US Border Patrol Academy’s mock border sites, border patrol agents take part in engaging realistic scenarios to give them a sense of what to do when deployed at the border real: how to track, retain and decide. whether to use deadly force against people they call “illegal aliens.” The latter are played by hired actors, often Hispanic-American, naturalized citizens from places like Mexico, who play the “bad citizen,” the “non-citizen,” the menace.

Your work teaches us to look more closely at the fine line between fact and fiction.

DC: In the exhibition, the first two walls and the entrance are meant to disorient you, in a way that invites your curiosity and to look very carefully at what is in the images. It’s a practice of juxtaposing different things to invite the viewer to figure out what’s going on here. With journalism today, we often see the same kind of pictures, and whether it’s the front lines of war or the border, we think we’ve seen them. We don’t look. It becomes meaningless. By using fiction, I hope to make people think differently about reality, to look more critically at what we are shown.

After your first book, you are now interested in the performance of American citizenship. What led you there?

DC: This experience of looking at military sites and writing about the blurring of reality and fiction in a militarized country for The necessary fictions it made me realize that these “exceptional places” actually highlight the truth about our culture. We believe these sites are about overseas war, but they have become a multi-million dollar business and are incorporated in the United States. What does it mean to normalize the fictional scenarios that take place in such sites? This is the purpose of my practice, to make us see the metaphorical air we breathe. All of this got me thinking about the show, not only about how official fictions work, but also how we enact them and how civil society enacts Americanness. Not only the military and the Border Patrol Academy, but American history museums invariably portraying Americans as heroic victors and victims, as well as the political rallies I documented in mOdelia Ccitizenship.

What attracted you to historical museums?

DC: I am interested in how museums try to attract visitors by creating immersive environments designed to bring history to life. I’m attracted to trompe l’oeil and the sometimes absurd side effects. Check out this image, “9/11 World Trade Center Installation”: On the walls of the museum, a found photograph of the exploding Twin Towers has been enlarged and installed around the corners of a museum space. It’s hard to get your bearings, but you can see a pipe in the ceiling above the wallpaper. This is a case where the push for realism has gone perhaps a little too far. Or if you take in the Colonel Mitchell Paige diorama at the World War II Museum in Eldridge, Pennsylvania. The exhibition honors a local boy who served bravely in World War II. In doing so, they turned him into Rambo, the Vietnam War veteran movie character from 1980s movies. We can’t help but turn to Hollywood to remember and honor our soldiers. It is not accidental. This image is just on the other side of a wall in my experimental film incorporating Hollywood footage.

The closing film of the exhibition is untitled Pineland/Hollywood. Tell the story of a traffic stop in a mix of Hollywood action and war movies.

DC: The story is a case study, an encapsulated version of the larger questions I face. Pineland/Hollywood is about a traffic stop where the difference between fact and fiction became the difference between life and death. As part of my research, I’m always immersing myself in cultural representations of what I’m looking at. I was watching a lot of war movies when I was working on this project. He was among them Bridge over the River Kwai. In a scene where the protagonist enters a military base and is suddenly attacked, thrown to the ground by a man with a knife. A supervisor intervenes, revealing that the attacker was a trainee in the middle of an exercise. I had this sudden flash of enlightenment: Could it be possible to try to tell the story of Pineland using Hollywood film clips? And what other layer could that add? Eventually, Pineland/Hollywood use 500 fair use clips from 200 movies in 10 minutes to tell a story. And there’s a revelation at the end that I won’t reveal to viewers, but like all my work, it pays attention.

Model Citizens / Citoyens Modèles is available in bookstores and online. It is published in English by Radius Books (Here) and in French by ÉTextual editions (Here).

Debi Cornwall – Model citizens
Curators: Nathalie Herschdorfer and Lydia Dorner
A co-production with Photo Elysée
Until September 29
Les Rencontres d’Arles
Photo Elysée