The empire of signs: rites, ceremonies, punishments
Among the guiding principles for the operators, led by Brunhes, was the need to document all kinds of ceremonies and rituals. The Archives of the Planet thus allow us to illustrate diverse traditions from the Far East, strange funerary structures in Norway, Bosnia, Egypt, and Greece, the prayer and contemplation of Buddhist and Orthodox monks, the mass prayers of the faithful in the Great Mosque of Delhi, and the performances of actors from the N? Theatre In Japan, or the investiture ceremony of a caliph in Istanbul, pilgrimages, processions, sacrifices, folk dances… All of this combined with documentation of Western rites and daily life in various European and North American metropolises, the protocol of diplomatic summits… And it is even possible to find in these archives examples of the administration and execution of justice: the interiors of prisons and cells in Mongolia, the arrest of criminals, the harrowing and unusual ordeal of some of the condemned… Kahn's projects sought to understand the reasons for the world's transformations and, through this knowledge that ranged from the most familiar and everyday to the most exotic extremes, to try to grasp the effects and thus prevent the consequences. The objectives—utopian, pacifist—of The Archives of the Planet aimed, in short, to create a miniature universe that brought together the different sensibilities of being in the world. Thus, this utopia was embodied in the search for a (visual) way for humanity itself to know itself better. Then, a humanity that believed itself complete and finished would receive—as Lévi-Strauss wrote—the revelation that it was not alone, that it constituted a piece in a vaster whole, and that to know itself it first had to contemplate its unrecognizable image in that mirror from which a plot forgotten by the centuries was going to cast its first and last reflection.
