Fire has followed Ecotopia since its birth and it is thanks to it that the artists have created the charcoal ink that is deposited on each of their canvases. By calcination, they transform the organic matter collected along their natural journeys into a black smoke. Fire itself is a process of expression of nature, a rite of transformation of matter into something else. This fire, mixed with water, has come to take the imprint of the soul of the mountains and the seas many times over. In this third moment of the Ecotopia project, it is the imprint of this transformation that is addressed, so that we can find ourselves face to face with the magic that this magic conjures up. One night in the winter of 2020, on a walk in the heart of nature, a group of friends collecting fallen wood, creates a campfire on the edge of the forest. They light it under the first super-moon of the year, which hour after hour overhangs it more and more. These woods that were once born of this nature are now entangled, concentrated in a circumscribed hearth of small stones waiting for the flame of a lighter, to illuminate one last time the forest of their birth, transmuting their energy into light and heat, before becoming again fertile food for it. During combustion, dances, songs and performances are performed near the fire. If the ritual is an idea that may come to mind, when we walk down the steps of Ecotopia, the moment of fire expresses it much more. Nothing else but this fire is enough to create the ritual. To soften the fire, at the cost of a few burns on the linen. It is nature and not man that induces the sacred. We are at most the witnesses who, during the experience of this transformation, came to collect on a linen canvas the imprint, the echo of what nature pronounced that evening with them.

A Step Into My Wallpaper est la deuxième vidéo réalisée par Antoine Ceunebroucke dans son appartement de Nice après Magic Flat en 2018. Cette vidéo a été faite sur Photoshop à partir de prises de vues réelles dans l’appartement et de vidéos dénichées sur internet. C’est une succession d’images retouchées qui donne vie à un « collage animé ». Ce côté technique rudimentaire, qui s’inspire du Stop Motion, transforme la réalité avec beaucoup de liberté. Aussi bien l’image que le son ont été réalisés courant 2019-2020 dans cet appartement, sachant que la fin de la vidéo a été faite pendant la période de confinement. Le sujet traite de notre société de plus en plus confinée, où nous vivons dans des appartements de plus en plus petits, entourés d’écrans qui nous éloignent plus qu’ils nous rapprochent. Cette vidéo propose de fuir cet état de confinement par l’imaginaire.

During an immersion residency in a retirement home, Lena Durr was able to spend time with all the residents during moments of communal living and participate in certain activities. These moments are the subject of the film entitled Jeanne Marguerite. They are only still shots, filmed discreetly. The faces are not visible, or only partially, for the sake of anonymity. We find the daily life of these old people punctuated by the different activities and long moments of waiting and boredom. Parallel to his visits to the old people’s home, the artist came into contact with a home cleaning company which allowed him to attend an intervention. The sequences filmed at the retirement home are punctuated by images of a house being emptied. They evoke the possible current state of the past daily environment of these people.

A popular and cultural Catalan event dear to the artist, the Correfocs are part of a protest movement. Forbidden during the period when Franco reigned over Spain, they have their origins in 12th century dances, exulting the devil and evil in popular beliefs. With this desire to revive the poetic and protestant force of the Catalan language, Correfocs maintains this relationship with the misunderstanding of a language that has been bullied. In this context, the artist has chosen to construct the images and their incandescent rhythms with a poem by Pere Gimferrer, Cacera: the Hunt. Poem not translated today. Author of several writings, he has constructed his poetic relationship to language by using both languages with the politics of the time. Taking into account his personal history and in the inaccessible understanding of his father’s language, Catalan, Camille Franch-Guerra sings in Castilian the stories of a hunt during the dictatorship, the one his grandfather lived through, and fictionalises it in this translation from Catalan to Castilian, via French.

The proposal deals with an eminently characteristic feature of our current society, the desire to be famous, or to put it differently, the desire to come out of the shadows and into the light, sometimes even hoping to become that « light ». This desire for celebrity seems to be winning over more and more individuals today; and this phenomenon has been greatly increased by the multiplication of information via social networks, reality TV, the multiplication of screens, and more generally, with all the strategies put in place by the entertainment society. In 1968, in the catalogue of an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Warhol wrote: « In the future, everyone will be entitled to 15 minutes of world fame. « Indeed, everyone can now claim a form of celebrity if they wish. But what kind of celebrity are we talking about? Why is it so? And with what consequences?

Dungeon is a project carried out with the participation of Julien Griffaud.

Usine de prot is a video filmed in a studio with three cameras to take up the device of TV sets with a decor and light inspired by surgical operating theatres. On the table, several utensils and jars of 100% whey Protein professional are at the protagonists’ disposal. Three characters are involved in the manufacture of a material in a mechanical way, on a chain. And as the material becomes bigger and bigger, it becomes more and more organic, abstract and uncontrollable. The artist creates oppositions between a very sanitized image and a disgusting material. To do this, she mixes universes linked to the food and medical industries and questions the body transformed by the consumption of artificial food used, in this case, for muscle building. In a society that has to meet ever more extreme standards and criteria of beauty, this generates a form of violence and rejection through the manipulation of matter that becomes symbolic.

Cameras on telephones are the result of our ability to manipulate the environment and the evolutionary possibilities offered by the objects around us. If these are still communication tools, we have added images to the spoken language. Social networks have also affected, first of all, the sender-recipient relationship, then, while the message is no longer aimed at a specific recipient (like a bottle in the sea), they have also directly affected our relationship to the visual, to aesthetics, to framing, to filters, to subjects… The « Catalogue of the movements of the world’s background » is simply a collection of videos that started from a first video of average quality shared, over 24 hours, on social networks. Architecture is the background of our everyday life. Making video as an architect is a way of representing my fixation on everything that happens before and after our passage. The architect mainly represents the non-existent (in order to build it). The heritage architect mainly represents the existing (with the aim of intervening, conserving). This video is therefore a collection of existing but not always obvious movements.

Inspiré du jeu Google T-rex; qui apparaît sur Google Chrome quand il n’y a pas de connexion internet. L’histoire de la vie de Google Dinosaure qui, en crise existentielle, se met à tourner en rond, car sa vie n’existe qu’à partir de la non-existence de la connexion internet.  

Cette vidéo est une relecture du tutoriel de Chris Hadfield, How to cook spinach in space, disponible sur Youtube. L’astronaute canadien a réalisé une série de vidéos de ce type pour rendre compte de son quotidien dans l’espace. Depuis longtemps passionnée d’astronomie, Celia Hue est fascinée par la grâce que peut prendre n’importe quel sujet en apesanteur, y compris les épinards. L’artiste a donc souhaité rendre hommage à la beauté de la non-gravité et à l’absurdité de ces tutoriels qui ne serviront pas à la plupart des terriens mais qui ont tout de même conquis des millions de spectateurs. Cette technique d’animation lui a permis d’épurer l’espace de la vidéo pour ne laisser que les éléments flottants afin de

mieux rendre compte du phénomène d’apesanteur.

My screen.gif est un assemblage numérique génératif, obtenu à partir différentes images d’archives chinées sur internet. Le procédé qu’utilise Iris Martin consiste à fabriquer des images en mouvement constituées de phrases ou d’objets tirés de façon quasi aléatoire dans une base de données. L’artiste expérimente et invente des protocoles automatisés dans le but d’en extraire un certain non-sens dans le but de générer de la poésie.

The door of the room opens, you enter… the place is no longer a resting place but a special experience. The room is invaded by oversized coloured beads. The choreographic props from the video have taken their place in this room, enlarged, available to the spectators.

Lacrizotiek is a video made during a workshop conducted by the artist Sara Sadik in the Busserine district of Marseille in July 2019. Co-written and performed by eight teenagers from the AGORA social centre, Lacrizotiek takes the form of a report by the fictional channel Blackwhite TV on the arrival of extraterrestrials in the city of La Busserine.
Lacrizotiek was produced within the framework of the Résidence Publication Rebel Rebel , with the support of the Logirem Foundation and in partnership with the FRAC Provence-Alpes Côte d’Azur, Marseille. Courtesy of FRAC PACA

Summer time Soils, 8’ 23 min, 2018

Tanning Ritual,19’ 43 min, 2018

In August, every year for the past 6 years, Liam Witter has carried out a series of actions that confront his human position with the fact that he is continually living everyday life in the manner of a tourist. There is an auto-biographical basis in his work that traces the artist’s feeling of being perpetually caught between two identities and the complications encountered after emigrating from the UK. These actions are often conscious of the specific geographies of the latter’s environment. Rituel d’été brings together actions from the last five editions, which included, among others, the demand for sunglasses in bars and restaurants in the south of France with a phrase book in French. Getting lost in the scorching heat and making engravings of the landscape on sunglasses. Taking pictures of the British flag worn as an accessory. A song about the floors of different countries and of course the tanned tattoos of French words made in Whitley Bay for ArtHouses in 2018. This « tourist » character plays with the borderline between naivety and hidden intentions. The tourist is someone who seeks to infiltrate cultures by appropriating and imitating cultural codes. The setting of a hotel allows this feeling of cultural flow to be evacuated, where jet-setters can find themselves in the same hotel lounge as civil servants and spies.