runo Serralongue’s artist book Rapport de Forces, a collage of photographs taken by the artist and selected journalists‘ texts, starting in the 80s and including very recent work, introduces an open narrative about the union workers’ struggle in Korea and calm but unambiguous use of violence by global capitalism. From the beginning the reader is launched into the story, from recent news about big dismissals in Daewoo Motors in Piping during the process of “reconstruction” of the company, through the personal story of Yu Man Heyong, which has a role of subjective frame that opens a larger picture: “Caricature of the Korean worker as Europeans would imagine him, highly disciplined, works even while on strike … never taking off his union vest … having offi cial working day time 3-4 hours longer than his colleagues in Europe … working 14 years in factory…not married … recently fi red … on strike in a front of factory gate for a fi ve months without success… he is struggling not against liberal! Capitalism, but to save national pride and prevent selling of his company to the nasty Americans”. This personal story is not only a comment on yellow emotionalism in the bourgeois press, but also a personifi cation of working class destiny in countries in transition. The “colorful” reality of a Korean transition is portrayed from the uniformed offi ce skyscrapers and shopping malls to 24 gravestones of workers who committed suicide as a closing chapter of the book. In the portraits of novelist Kim Sung Ok and movie director Park Kwang Su, whose art was often related to worker’s movements, we should maybe look for elements of artist identifi cation and artistic statement. Combining history, news, observations, archival and new material, Bruno Serralongue is creating another way of disseminating information. It is less about chasing the facts and endless reconstruction of truth, and more about the art world adopting different tactics in order to challenge its social sphere. In an environment marked by overwhelming news industry that fabricates “objective” facts and images, artist Bruno Serralongue creates inevitably “subjective” and imperfect, but nonetheless r eal, reports that move the emphasis from the production to exploration of mechanisms of observation of images and stories.
JELENA VESIC, Belgrad

Bruno Serralongue
Rapport de Forces
Published November 2004

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