Powhatan Motel, Pocahontas, Illinois

At the Powhatan Motel, Doreen and I strike up a conversation. She's tending the Motel for her sister while she's on vacation. Her sister has ADD, as does her son, who works as a rancher in Texas. I tell her that I have twin girls and show her some photographs. She looks at them carefully, running her hands lightly over the images and informs me that she is a twin as well. "These girls are very bright. You need to provide stimulation for them. They need to be challenged. I think they'll be either doctors or lawyers one day." It seems that her sister is a Psychic and I guess some of her powers are hereditary.

I leave and return to my room and wonder how I'll begin to stimulate the minds of little geniuses —piano lessons, dance classes, math courses, martial arts? Maybe they should be meeting other geniuses their age? I’ll have to Google “gifted children” when I get back to Montreal.

I'm tempted to turn my camera on the giant brightly-coloured water tower that stands in the middle of a cornfield nearby, but I'm reminded of the numerous MEWCs (middle-eastern with cameras) that have been reported to local police and I change my mind. I decide to film my motel room instead.

I'm interested in the idea of documentary. I'm not talking about the news, which seems to be the dominant form. I'm talking about a documentary approach, a forced engagement with something that is not constructed specifically for the camera or the uneasy relationship between the real and the fictive. The real on an intimate scale always seems to defy and complicate larger political discourses. Can one understand history other than from a textbook? Can one perform history? Can history be picked up and handled? Can it be examined as one would examine an old shoe? I'm thinking about the 1977 video, “The Eternal Frame.” The video takes the assassination of President Kennedy as both a historical event and televised experience and stages a recreation on the exact site of the fated day. Recreations in documentaries are nothing new but in this case they performed the murder repeatedly and grotesquely for the excited crowd that gathered to watch the spectacle. Most had seen the event on television 10 years before and as they relate their experience of the performance to their memory of the televised version, we begin to grapple with another way of perceiving history.
I’d like to use a documentary approach within an installation.