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122
Viviane Sassen, Code/Blue, 2019

Chapter: Small Right Hand Down - Democracy and Freedom

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A radically subjective view of Versailles
For her series Venus & Mercury, the Dutch fashion photographer and artist Viviane Sassen photographed at the Palace of Versailles for six months. She explored archives, architecture, and artifacts, including fragments of sculptures and Marie Antoinette’s private correspondence, to present a radically subjective view of this site of political power and its history. Sassen’s visual language is characterized by photomontages splashed with pigments, abstract forms, and hybrid figures inspired by the palace’s marble statues, blending historical research with staging and imagination.

Beauty, illness, decay, and intrigue
The result was a multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk: a twenty-minute video shown on two screens that combines more than a hundred photographs and collages with a narrative voice by Tilda Swinton reading short stories by the Dutch poet Marjolijn van Heemstra. These narratives delve into the hidden history of the French royal court and explore themes such as power, gender, sex, beauty, illness, decay, and intrigue.

Seal of secrecy
Code / Blue shows a coded letter from the queen, enclosed by a blue pool of color that recalls spilled ink. The color acts like a seal of the secret she wished to preserve, but also functions as a gestural reference to the violent end of her reign, or to the passion that might be revealed behind the code.

I love you madly
During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette used an encryption method (a polyalphabetic substitution cipher) to communicate with her close confidant, Count Axel von Fersen. Her letters, often written in invisible ink or encrypted, contained both political strategies and highly personal messages. In 2021, researchers used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to decipher the hidden text beneath the ink.


Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Viviane Sassen, Code/Blue, 2019
From the series Venus & Mercury
Digital print on rag paper
© Viviane Sassen. Courtesy of Stevenson, Cape Town/Amsterdam

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