The Story of Feniks and Abdullah

Description:

While in residence at Western Front, Luc Bourdon produced the single-channel video The Story of Feniks and Abdullah. Described as a video poem, the work follows Abdullah (voiced by Bourdon), who has just arrived in Vancouver and tries unsuccessfully to reach Feniks (voiced by Vanessa Richards), but his calls go straight to voicemail. Shot from the perspective of a visitor, the video drifts through observational city scenes that range from residential streets to tourist destinations—downtown, Chinatown, Granville Island, the seawall, and the former Stanley Park Zoo. Over these images, Abdullah’s voicemail recordings are interwoven with poetic, confessional text fragments drawn from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). Set to an original score by M. F. Cote, Bourdon’s meditation on love and longing situates personal desire within the experience of travel, evoking the geographic, psychic, and emotional spaces of relationships.

Video documentation is available upon request.