ABSTRACT

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was famously described by Vivian Mercer as a play in which nothing happens, twice. In a recent project by the Swiss photographer Jules Spinatsch, published in 2005 as a book entitled Temporary Discomfort Chapters I-V, it might be claimed that nothing happens five times. Each of the book’s five chapters uses different photographic techniques to examine the short-term transformations visited on the venues of various meetings of the G8 and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Genoa, New York, Evian, and Geneva. The heavy security restrictions and procedures surrounding these events are what produce the temporary discomfort of Spinatsch’s title. The title has a deliberately low-key, anticlimactic ring, at odds with the usual emphasis on the prestige and importance of the gathering and the scale and vociferousness of the attendant protests. Accordingly, the exclusion zones and security areas which Spinatsch depicts are mostly quiet, emptied of activity, often shrouded in darkness. Suspended between the political business and the choreographed theatre of the talks themselves and the drama and fervour of the protests surrounding them, Spinatsch’s chosen territory is a no-man’s-land, constructed precisely to put distance between the two main sets of actors. Except for a single shot of a protestor mounting a fence, the principal actors are absent. Instead it is those intended to keep them apart – the security men and police officers – who populate the photos. However, even these are rarely seen engaging in anything that might be construed as action. Mostly, they stand around and watch and wait. Mostly, in other words, these are documents of highly organized, technically sophisticated inactivity. Nothing happens.