As part of the Performing Archive project, Careof presents Plot Point Trilogy, by filmmaker artist Nicolas Provost (Belgium, 1969), composed of three film works created between 2007 and 2012. Within the set designed for Taking Careof, the space transforms into a cinematic environment that fosters immersion and deepens the complex mechanisms on which the trilogy is structured.

Investigating the boundaries between reality and fiction, Nicolas Provost’s work begins with a reflection exploring the language and grammar of cinema, to construct unusual pathways where anyone, at some point, can intersect or recognize themselves. Plot Point Trilogy transgresses dramaturgical conventions to transform them into new narrative forms. Each film evokes unsettling and suspicious atmospheres. It starts from a "where" rather than a "how," ideally reconstructing, through the structure of editing, the cinematic map of our memory.

New York is the city from which this journey begins, and with Plot Point (15’, 2007), the first film of the trilogy, it takes us back to recover sounds and images from mixed cinematic times. Filmed with a hidden high-resolution camera, Times Square transforms into a place of intense dramatic narrative, with passersby and police officers becoming unwitting protagonists.

The journey continues in Las Vegas with Sturdust (20’, 2010) where, using the same technique, Provost films the ordinary life of a city, transforming it into a fiction film. The unexpected presence of Hollywood stars—Jon Voight, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson—converts the glorious power of the gambling capital into an exotic crime story. Tokyo is instead the urban set of the last film: Tokyo Giants (22’, 2012). In the hyperkinetic streets of the Japanese metropolis, a serial killer, a robber, a terrorist, and the Yakuza cross their stories through the combination of sound and cinematic narrative, giving rise to a powerful climax that alters the dimension of reality and accentuates its mystery.

“We are all part of a huge collective film memory.” NP

Performing Archive is a project born on the occasion of Taking Careof that uses the archive to drive practices and initiatives in order to consider its most representative aspects of display, content, and language and to contemplate historical memory in order to update and expand it.