New Shelter Plan, Copenhagen. Photo: Johan Rosenmunthe

Night Map

Multiple screen slide installation (2012 -)

Michèle Bernstein’s novel La Nuit (1961) is a love story between Geneviève and Gilles, a couple of Parisian intellectuals, and their younger lover Carole. Modeled the 18^th century French ménage-à-trois novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, the story is a fictionalized description of Bernstein’s life with Guy Debord, with whom she was a member of the Situationist International, in the 1950s. La Nuit describes a turning point in the trio’s relationship mapping Gilles and Carole’s seemingly endless walk through Paris one night.

Borrowing the method of détournement of texts and maps (a frequently-used strategy of the SI), Buhl has traced the walk of Gilles and Carole on a map of Paris. Night Map is a site-specific installation; every time the work is exhibited, she transfers the Parisian walking route from the novel to the surroundings of where the work is shown, walking and photographing at night along the new route repositioning the story. Buhl’s photographs are exhibited with text fragments from the novel.