Corinne Vionnet and the Culture of Excess

I realized that it wasn't just the act of taking photographs that interested me, but rather the image itself—the impact of the image.

Corinne Vionnet

Corinne Vionnet (Switzerland, 1969) was among the first artists to explore our frenzied consumption of images on the internet. For over twenty years, she has continuously examined and reinterpreted the familiar images of tourist travel that circulate endlessly across our screens.

Commissioned by Photo Elysée, Going Nowhere is an artist’s book that portrays a world saturated with images. Taking the form of a Rolodex—an object once ubiquitous on office desks before the digital age—it becomes, in her hands, an image-based device that questions the memory of our contemporary societies.

By spinning the Rolodex, viewers activate 444 double-sided printed cards that construct two sides of the same story. On one side are screenshots of a continuous flow of traffic captured at night by surveillance cameras, unfolding like a long sequence shot. On the other are images gathered from the internet that evoke the desire to travel far away and experience a sense of freedom. As it turns, the Rolodex produces a faint clicking sound that gives rhythm to and fragments the viewing experience. Like a wheel of fortune, it spins unpredictably, leaving the act of looking to chance. The title appears again and again, like the haunting refrain of fate: Going Nowhere. A destination that sounds like a bad omen.

The Rolodex activates our memory. At first glance, certain motifs are immediately recognizable: the sun, a palm tree, an airplane… They belong to the iconography of holidays, carrying the promise of escape and well-earned rest. The images linger. Very quickly, a sense of déjà vu takes hold, oscillating between boredom and astonishment, between the reassuring comfort of routine and the anxiety of a vicious circle.

Sequence after sequence, the sublime gradually gives way to chaos, as though the gaze itself were burning under the strain of overexposure. Corinne Vionnet plays with accumulation, superimposition and transparency, creating juxtapositions that are at times subtle, at others abrupt. Through these processes, she deconstructs the symbols of an idealized “elsewhere.” A form of resistance gradually emerges against the machine that manufactures dreams. The ocean darkens, palm trees burst into flames, white airplane trails criss-cross the sky like cracks in a shattered screen, beaches become saturated to the point of suffocation, and cruise ships pile up like a Tower of Babel on the verge of collapse.

The light, meanwhile, is hypnotic. First the glare of car headlights, then the light of the sun. Or is it a spotlight? Omnipresent, it offers no respite. Everything demands to be perpetually seen and looked at, to the point of blindness. The gaze finds itself in a liminal space between the physical world and the realm of screens, which provides access to a permanent mirage. Tourists take selfies while a dinosaur stranded on a beach encounters pyramids bathed in an artificial glow. Dream and reality intertwine, as though absorbed into an eternal present.

Amid this whirlwind of anonymous images, the artist occasionally inserts cards printed on transparent material.

Slogan-like words flash into view in an almost stroboscopic rhythm: Happy, More, Fast, Better… Familiar words, repeated relentlessly and presented as promises of power and success. They become injunctions to happiness and productivity, imprinted on our minds.

Then come fragments of personal memory, too fleeting and too ordinary to hold our attention. They bear witness to an individual experience that dissolves into the mass, ultimately giving way to a standardized collective imaginary.

Finally, glitched images reinforce the sense of a technological world in the process of collapsing.

Within this culture of excess, Corinne Vionnet gives form to the system through which images circulate, saturating our daily lives with standardized and repetitive visuals. Every day, more than fourteen billion images are shared in an orchestrated spectacle that no longer makes us mere viewers, but also producers of ephemeral data. Today, it would be impossible to remember every image we have seen; and yet they continue to haunt our memories, even as they seem to lead us nowhere.