Artist:
Adrien Missika (born 1981 in Paris, France; lives and works in Berlin, Germany).

Materials:
Super 8 film with sound transferred to DVD; 10 min 29 secs.

Description:
“The Super-8 film Dôme (2011) is perhaps Missika’s most ambitious work to date. Here, an anonymous young man explores a vast domed structure built by Oscar Niemeyer on the site of the Tripoli International Fair in Lebanon. Its construction was halted in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and it has stood incomplete and inaccessible to the public ever since. As the camera follows the man through the building’s shadowy interior, we see him slapping at the steel tendrils that hang from its concrete walls and beams as though they were piano keys or guitar strings. His actions slowly transform Niemeyer’s cupola into a gigantic musical instrument, filling it with an echoing composition of rattles, clunks, and clangs. In the film’s final frames, we see him clamber up the dome’s exterior, like an astronaut about to plant a flag on an unblemished Martian peak, or the last inhabitant of a blasted Earth attempting to hail a passing starship. Is this a beginning, or an end? In Missika’s work, both possibilities walk hand in hand.”
—Tom Morton, “Focus: Adrien Missika,” Frieze 149 (September 2012).