Adam Leech : "The Historian of Brussels, Illinois" (video, 2007, 4 min)

Zurich’s experimental film festival Videoex invites Potential Estate. Cabinet Voltaire consists in a compilation of videos shown in the context of previous Cabinets or selected for this event. All of them are premières in Switzerland. Next to Potential Estate’s collective film, the program includes films by guests artists Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin (F), Brian Springer (USA) and David Robbins (USA). The programs will be introduced by a member of Potential Estate. Videoex runs from May 21 to May 29. Potential Estate’s screening dates are to be announced soon.

Since 2006 Potential Estate has been developing a mobile, pars pro toto format – a Cabinet – in which knowledge dilutes itself into tales. Each Cabinet is a chapter in a plurivocal narrative whose epilogue is continually postponed. Using auctions, drinking games, bowling alleys, films, t-shirts and rodeos, Potential Estate invoke the ghosts of forgotten Modern figures, who often appear to them as venomous tricoloured snakes.

Each Cabinet is the chapter of a plurivocal narrative. One could already come across the ghosts of pedagogist Joseph Jacotot, communard geographer Élisée Reclus, multiple pseudonym Wally Hope, fourierist anarchist Marie-Adèle Anciaux, Hopi priest Cleo Jurino and artworks of guest artists Seth Price, Joe Scanlan, Jimmie Durham and David Robbins just to quote a few of them.