Two video works: The Hospital, filmed in 1999 during two months in the geriatric department of a Parisian hospital, and Ovidie, filmed in 2000. Ovidie is a young porn actress that Hahn met by chance. She filmed her through her different activities – shootings, net performances or photography performances for amateurs). This professional relationship was also a friendly one: Ovidie and her husband, James, lived at Hahn’s home for a few months.

The works present two radical states of the body through parallel situations. The body is here and there manipulated and instrumented; it points out the control’s system inherent propensities, especially in environments of a daily confrontation with the limits.

The work by Hahn, dealing with apparently similar extreme states, is actually circumscribed in a limit space, since it appoints a re-elaboration of the “specific inscribing of each text [in this case, a visual text] in referenced fields as real causality fields” (J.Derrida – La Dissemination). Because the work of Hahn deals with the gap between the old, sick and suffering body and the young, beautiful and sexualized body, it plays in the margin in and of the limit space. The parallel between the two video works, beyond the resemblances and differences of corporality it shows, draws new cleavages.

In “The Hospital”, the image of the body is called into question. It is broken and can’t be perceived in its entireness. We just perceive it through fragments. This fragmented, cut up body, reduced to suffering organs, is in the impossibility of claiming the true entire body: disrupted identity ending in the loss of name. When the entire body reappears, it is again in the same impossibility. Its only conditions of visibility are the support of various mechanics: wheel chair, re-education’s instruments. It is a paradoxical return to the whole body, simultaneously asserting its incomplete status, since needing the extension through prosthesis.

In the porn world, the body deals with similar issues: fragmentation or relative fullness. There is a focus on precise parts of the body, according to their obvious sexual power. This biased anatomic perception just recognizes excitation. The body has to play with exact combinations to appear in its entireness: other partners, instruments or staging through “net” performances. Thus, the identity is defined just through complements.

If we consider the organ instead of the body, the resemblances fade away and dissonances appear. In the hospital world, the organ is neutralized by the therapeutic gesture (the injection or the bandage). In the porn environment, the organ is invested – even over-invested – by affect and power. Moreover, this opposition is already present between the works’ titles. The Hospital as a place of suffering – and we’ll stay with this definition, since the pain goes before the treatment – that, through its anonymity, prevents from (re)cognition and identification processes, but reveals itself as a disjunction, a “symbolic” scene of suffering as identity loss, neutralization and erasing of meanings. Ovidie points out the return to the name. This video work doesn’t deal with the porn world but with the individual behaviour of a young actress facing this environment: it presents a clearly defined identity. There is an overbid of meaning: Ovidie is not a first name, but a pseudonym.

Through the instrumentation of the body, neutrality and anonymity versus meaning and identity? This opposition could be the cleavage between the two video works by Hahn: a partition between active and passive. The issues are distributed according to this separation line: distance and identification, gaze and touch, multiple variations of the same issue. The body oscillates between the two extremes, without steady status. It is ambivalent. It makes concrete a “Somewhere Else”. The suffering, old body is a foreigner, a frightening one that has to be rejected. The “porn” body is a consumption product, an object of desire, therefore a covetable body. This body simultaneously makes concrete a deep human situation: the pain (old age and death) as our proper potentiality and the pornography as a possible of our sexuality. Conditioned by this movement between the unknown and the too known, the body acts as a surface of projection, the projection of phantasms in the frame of the effective porn taxonomy and of fears in the medical frame (as says one of the nurses, when Hahn talks about touching a dying person: “It’s like seeing yourself facing you”). Through the corporal ambiguity, the same vector: the body, as a place of power relations - between oneself and the others, between oneself and oneself – is crossed by the cleavage active / passive. More than the difference between being submitted to / producing the gesture, active and passive draw the gap between the two works.

Stopping being the object of manipulating / manipulated forms of fascination transforms the control on the body into a real power on those which remain under fascination. And there, the active is sovereign. When the sick persons, and the hospital staff, tend to the neutralization of the limits, the active attitude of a thoughtful pornography (“[…] if you think about what you see, about what you live, if you take your distance…”, as explains James) consists in radicalizing the limits, going over them. Actually, it attempts breaking the identities that are shaped by the outside gaze. On the whole, it is the price that the individual has to pay for defining a Moral and becoming a subject.