Alejandro Cesarco at Jackson Ave / Queens Plaza

Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes is a temporary public art project by Alejandro Cesarco. Cesarco’s project is the second artwork commissioned through SculptureCenter’s art education program Public Process.

Words Like Love: Alphaville, First Scenes is installed on a 14-by-48-foot billboard over Jackson Avenue at the intersection of Queens Plaza in Long Island City. The work is a textual interpretation of the opening scene of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), an iconic science fiction/noir film that describes a futuristic dystopian society controlled by a supercomputer. Re-translating the film back into a screenplay, Cesarco’s project stresses the descriptive and prescriptive function of scripts: the text in this case is made to both mirror its surroundings and, to some extent, dictate the reality we see before us. Through its prominent placement over a busy intersection in Queens, the billboard points to how texts mediate public space and social life while locating critical and resistant capacities in the acts of reading and interpretation.

Alejandro Cesarco (born Montevideo, Uruguay; lives and works in New York) addresses, through different formats and strategies, his recurrent interests in repetition, narrative, and the practices of reading and translating.

The project is up June 3 — July 2, 2017.

Images courtesy the artist and SculptureCenter, New York. Photos by Kyle Knodell. Text courtesy of SculptureCenter, New York.