Chapitre IV – The Supermarket (O Canto da Floresta)

The supermarket is a meeting place. Commodities arrive in the morning, some of them are put aside, others are placed on the shelves by the employees. Customers enter the store, select them and trade them for money. The cashiers scan the pro-ducts one by one and receive the payments. Customers leave the store and are replaced by new ones. The receipts which were forgotten on the cash register are the traces of this activity : the paper which bends under the weight of its accumu-lation records the figures of this story of goods. A shop window is the part of a store which is separated from the street by a glass window where items for sale are displayed. We see but we can’t touch. It displays a selection of visible products while concealing the activity of the store under mar-keting pictures. The window shows us a small theater, like an invitation, but the goods don’t tell us their journey. I am not trying to rebuild this past. I assemble pieces of reality and juxtapose words and images to create an environment, a music, the melody of this forest of things that drive our world. We could question what they say about the culture that created them, but perhaps, and above all, this atmosphere expresses the desire to be in the movement of the streets, to be outside, to simply stand on the other side of the window.

« Les grands magasins c’est épatant,
On peut dire maintenant que l’vrai Paris
Ce n’est plus le boul’vard,
Mais le Printemps. »*

* Musical excerpt from Dans les magasins, French song from 1928, written and performed by Bach, Laverne and Nina Myral.