‘I think if it was another century, I’d be painting,’ Cyprien Gaillard tells me, as we sit in a Berlin post-production studio, where he is making final edits to a major new 35 mm film, Deterrent (2026), which forms the centerpiece of his solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria. The French artist pauses, reflects. ‘I’m just trying to use the camera like you’d pick up a brush, making a sort of landscape painting, whatever that means today.’

This is a question that is at the core of his practice. Since coming to prominence in the late 2000s, Gaillard has become one of contemporary art’s foremost chroniclers of the built environment, and how it is shaped both by human drives (to create, to preserve, to tear down, and begin anew), and by the ineluctable forces of entropy. Employing media including film, sculptural interventions, installation, photography, and live performance, he tracks humanity’s long passage through history, and the material deposits it leaves in its wake, from ancient Mayan ruins to Soviet-era social housing projects, antique artifacts to works of 20th-century public art. While the locations he explores range across geographies and cultures, his approach, as he explains, is ‘just going there, and having a look as it lays, with the changing context around it.’ This radical openness to site is what gives his films, in particular, their strange, compelling poetry. ‘The essence of something has a desire to manifest itself, once you apply moving image to it […] Things start to breathe, or have a life of their own, maybe like street animism.’

The Bregenz show, ‘When you expect flutes, it’s whistles’, borrows its title from the lyrics of Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book, a 1990 track by the neoclassical darkwave band Dead Can Dance, itself an adaptation of Luis de Góngora’s 1581 poem Da bienes Fortuna. Góngora’s theme is capricious fate, and the fact that for all our prior experience, we can never wholly predict what is around the next corner. Relatedly, Gaillard describes an unexpected ‘encounter’ he had ‘in the soundscape of the San Fernando Valley,’ California, which formed the genesis of Deterrent. When out walking one night, he ‘heard this distant singing,’ which he recognized as an old recording of the Neapolitan operatic tenor Enrico Caruso. Deciding to investigate further, the artist homed in on its source, which turned out to be ‘a speaker that was mounted behind a cage on the side of a 7-Eleven convenience store, almost like a caged bird, blasting out music.’

The store clerk told Gaillard that this anomalous sonic intervention in the Valley’s urban fabric was ‘a deterrent to loitering. It was understood at a corporate level that the sound most likely to create a void or empty space outside the store is classical music,’ says Gaillard. ‘I began thinking about how this European cultural export arrives in California, as far as Western civilization can go, the dead end of it, and finds itself weaponized. But what interested me was also that this music was porous, open to the world. It would let in other sounds, like a helicopter, a car alarm, or the doors of the convenience store opening and closing. It made me think of my own porosity, because, with time, I’ve become infinitely more porous to my environment. I’m a fervent believer in psychogeography. It comes from that.’

Against a soundtrack of classical music, Gaillard’s new film brings together footage of a variety of deterrent devices employed in the 21st-century civic landscape, from CCTV cameras to chain-link fences, from a moat of jagged rocks surrounding a fortress-like LA police precinct to an oddly heartbreaking sign warning that ‘Flower theft is a crime punishable by imprisonment.’ As the artist explains, ‘There is a wide range of them, not only directed towards humans, but also rodents, dogs, and birds’ (in one scene, the camera lingers on a taut length of pigeon wire on a building’s façade). He has, he says, always been interested in ‘public or shared space,’ but as his film attests, ‘it’s ever eroding.’

Gaillard describes Deterrent as more ‘painterly’ than his earlier films, and this is most obvious in a sequence shot along the concrete canals of the Los Angeles River, focusing on passages of graffiti hastily and ineffectually whitewashed by municipal workers. For Gaillard, these urban pentimenti recalled works by Josef Albers, or early Philip Guston. ‘I was seeing something like Abstract Expressionism, which is usually confined to an interior, relocated outside – a collective unintended fresco, manifesting itself.’

At its midpoint, Deterrent’s location switches from the US to Europe. ‘If the first part of the film evokes questions about the preservation of self,’ says the artist, ‘then the second part is really about cultural preservation.’ We see a comparatively chichi Swedish 7-Eleven store, embedded in a historic building like some glowing, parasitic entity, and the open-air drug culture in Hamburg’s St. Georg neighborhood, shot from the window of the city’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, accompanied by audio of a cough at a classical recital. Gaillard describes this involuntary, all-too-human sound as ‘suppressed,’ much like the behaviors discouraged by the deterrent devices seen earlier in the film. Yet, as he points out, ‘the acoustics of a music hall don’t discriminate, they carry the cough […] As an artist, you have to find your “in,” and it’s not really for you to reinterpret, say, Mozart, but the moment with the cough, that was something for me to take, to grasp.’ We might be reminded, here, of Gaillard wandering the San Fernando Valley, and hearing Caruso’s tenor as the ceaseless traffic droned along its boulevards, and police helicopters beat across its skies.

For Gaillard, who describes editing a film as ‘creating a collage in time,’ it is not the ‘mythology of a place’ that fascinates, but how it unfolds itself, in the here and now. As a species, we are, he says, involved in a constant ‘negotiation of space,’ the creation of forms of ‘coexistence’ that play out ‘in the context of bigger questions of historic and cultural preservation, and how we stand within the struggle against ruination.’ At Bregenz, object-based works echo the motifs and themes explored in Deterrent. These include a huge, ghost-white inflatable stick figure, of the type seen on the forecourts of American car dealerships. At once triumphant and tragicomic, it appears to dance to music booming from a towering speaker stack. Behind the Kunsthaus’s etched-glass façade, an intestinal construction debris chute seems to anticipate the building’s future demolition. In another piece, rolled zero euro banknotes – collectible notes printed with the European Central Bank’s authorization – are stuffed into flutes, pointing to a key presence in the film.

In Deterrent’s closing scene, the artist trains his camera on an animatronic sculpture, set into a building in Hamelin, Germany. A popular tourist attraction, it depicts the folkloric figure of the Pied Piper, who reportedly rid the town of rats by luring them away with his flute, creating what Gaillard calls ‘a minor void. But then the piper doesn’t get paid, so he comes back, and creates a bigger void by removing the town’s children.’ As the artist points out, while the ‘dark fable’ of the Pied Piper ‘is linear,’ the animatronic sculpture ‘is stuck on an ongoing loop.’ Watching it crank jerkily through its motions, we might imagine the rats – which Gaillard describes not as vermin but Hamelin’s rodent ‘inhabitants, seen from the more humane, ecological consciousness we have now’ – returning to the city time after time, in perpetuity. 

As I leave the post-production studio, and wander through Berlin’s streets, I find myself reflecting on the city’s population of rats, which has been estimated at 2 million – roughly one for every two human residents. Whatever deterrents we put in place, these creatures are our constant companions. They are with us when our great civilizations rise, and fall. They make a home in our gleaming palaces, and among our shattered ruins.