Valentin Noujaïm @ NıCOLETTı

United at NıCOLETTı last autumn, Valentin Noujaïm brings his urban enigmas Pacific Club (2022) and To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024), where they were joined by Demons to Diamonds, fresh off its gallery tour in 2025, to complete the artist’s La Défense Trilogy. While the films attempt to mystify a topic widely written about, the role of the individual in the big city, they do so to bring it into a world moving increasingly online. Aided by their immense installation at the Paul Street gallery that provides the necessary assault on the senses, Paris becomes a sublime concrete jungle, where the depth of the infrastructure and the depth of the human mind blur into one.

In Noujaïm’s Paris, we’re all ghosts. His protagonists move through the city alone, in a state halfway between reality and a dream. There’s a deeper meaning here that requires the trilogy to be viewed in order.

Pacific Club focuses on an underground nightclub frequented by the Arab community in the Algerian shantytown on which the Défense complex was built, which opened underneath in the late 1970s. Told through the eyes of Azedine Benabdelmoumene, who was in his late teens at the time, the film explores the culture that existed at the time, and how it resonates today; the pride and freedom that the Pacific Club provided, and the loss that the community had to endure as a result of violence.

Noujaïm’s digital renderings of the club, deftly styled to resemble the blueprints of the constructions that slowly killed it, present a very modern type of spectre. Today, memory is not buried under several feet of concrete, but exists eternally online through various communication streams. Time and memory, to quote Simon Gérard’s essay that accompanies the exhibitions, become “messianic,” a term borrowed from Walter Benjamin to describe a rejection of linear, progressive temporality. Just like the dancer who emerges from the car park that the club once inhabited, the memories of Pacific Club may have been evicted, but are still thriving in a new, digital home.

It would be crude, then, to call the subjects of these memories “ghosts,” but it’s worth noting that Pacific Club is by far the most sentimental film of the three. To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion takes the dislocation of memories in this urban jungle and moves it towards abjection. The elegant Kayije Kagame plays a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper in the Défense complex, but under increasing scrutiny and isolation, she begins to slip into dreams of setting the building alight. In To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion, there’s a clear move towards criticising the culture that inhabits the complex, more so than its existence in the first place.

It reads a lot like a visualisation of Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” where the differing speeds of the individual and the urban, collective psyche clash and slowly move in time with each other. In Simmel’s thinking, this is not a one-way process, with the individual sacrificing autonomy to exist in this space, giving themselves to the jungle. In Noujaïm’s film, this is articulated as abjection; sometimes literally, in the CG images of Kagame’s character eating a digital rendering of the building, and metaphorically, in the way the building guides Kagame through its halls and rooms, all as empty and maddening as the last.

This theme of abjection is particularly important in the project’s trajectory, being given the umbrella name Infrazone as a nod to Noujaïm’s recent monograph Interzone. As Gérard notes, the difference between ‘intra-’ and ‘infra-’ is one of ‘relation to space,’ which Gérard lines up with the Foucauldian concept of a dispositif. What Infrazone does show is the result of this, the eventual blurring of heterogeneity in the face of digitisation, where the infrastructure is reliant on both the mind and the geography as “zones.” To play out Pacific Club, we see a saxophonist perform a solo, the strong, deep tones creating music through their reverberation against the walls of the concrete box. We may see this particular choice of instrument as an example of abjection, the air in the musician’s lungs transformed into sound waves that identify the structure that surrounds him.

Following this trajectory, Demons and Diamonds produces the most explicit iteration of these ideas. ‘Le prisonnier’, our narrator (a pleasantly surprising appearance from Denis Lavant), represents a sort of angel of death; a man suspended in air by the various wiring and tubing protruding from his body to various corners of the dark concrete cave he inhabits (a much less glamorous visual than our saxophonist).

The film follows several vignettes, all loosely tied to an unfolding mystery: every day, at the same time, somebody throws themselves from the La Grande Arche. Kagame returns, again playing a fierce but slightly more concerned businesswoman, while other players include a salesman trying to flog a new virtual reality headset, and a mysterious, high-rise gimp. Despite its eclectic ensemble, however, the characters in Demons and Diamonds feel no less alone and ghostly than Noujaïm’s previous films. Here, Noujaïm settles on a cautionary tale of technology and its fragility, uniting the exploration of digital memory in Pacific Club and the search for escape in To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion.

His protagonists’ paranoia that they might be the next victim of this mysterious pattern of suicides is positioned alongside the dangerous oscillation between existing literally and virtually—of being a cyborg, in Donna Haraway’s words, literalised with grotesque accuracy by Lavant. La Défense, being the centre of technology, business, is the perfect setting: in one storey, a wealthy businesswoman and her assistant discuss the purchase of a new virtual reality headset, while in another storey, the same businesswoman entertains an unnamed man wearing a gimp mask, bringing this connection to technology to a fetishistic level (the headset bearing frightening resemblance to the gimp mask). It is only then, at this literal and figurative height, that we risk falling to our demise.

In his final speech, ‘Le prisonnier’ alludes that, while the Unknown Soldier lies beneath L’Arche de Triomphe, under La Grande Arc, there is no soldier because in the abject, digitised world of La Défense “we are all veritable unknown soldiers.” Noujaïm’s trilogy is “messianic,” relishing in technology’s ability to represent the past while cautious of its future capabilities.

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