Thoughts on an open-air cinema device
A long time before the invention of cinema, in open-air fairs, entertainers created shadow puppets behind a canvas and told stories.
I show this front of cinema and projection in a mirror by reversing the direction of the light: it is the screen that emits and cuts out the silhouettes of these new actors who project themselves into the device.
Contrary to the darkroom where the installation is simple and codified, here a whole ritual and scenography are set up.
The change of colours on the screen, like a beating psychedelic heart, becomes an energy wave.
I stage the interactions between this vibration, movements and attitudes.
The rhythm of the editing and the music brings these characters back into the temporal and sequential process of cinema.
But the evolution of shadow puppets towards digital technology and relief will soon make this so endearing sound disappear from the crackling sound at 24 frames per second from the projector ?
AGNÍ the FIRE
Every full moon night in Tiruvannamalai, thousands of pilgrims walk around Arunachala hill, the sacred mountain where Shiva the destruction god appeared as a column of fire.
Agní (अग्नि) is a Sanskrit word meaning fire and connotes the Vedic fire god of Hinduism. He is also the guardian deity of the southeast direction and is typically found in southeast corners of Hindu temples. In the classical cosmology of the Indian religions, Agni as fire is one of the five inert impermanent elements (pañcabhūtá) along with space (ākāśa), water (ap), air (vāyu) and earth (pṛthvī), the five combining to form the empirically perceived material existence (Prakriti)
The pool
I use this video medium as a contemplative and hypnotic meditation.
I question the primordial water, the water before we were born and the water of the origins of life on earth. The depth and the minimalist rocking of the music reinforce this interiority.
The transparency of the water refers us to the innocence of the child.
The serene exploration of the device by the bodies, the bond that is woven between them, the well-being that gradually takes hold to create a kind of intuitive and joyful Watsu*.Disappearances and out of frame embody the breaths of the movement and the time afterwards.
.*The Watsu ® is a tool to rebalance energies, based on techniques and theories of Eastern philosophy, aimed at the recovery and maintenance of psychophysical well-being.
Soham
The mantra Soham is called universal mantra because its vibration is the vital breath.
So is the sound of inhalation, Hamm is the sound of exhalation.
At five o’clock in the morning, the sun rises on the Backwaters: nature wakes up and starts to breathe.
This landscape is for me an evocation of the lost paradise, of a simpler time when men lived by gathering, fishing and hunting. I use the video tool for its slow distortion of time, its translation of reality and the relativity it underlines. This work is included in the continuation of my photographic research on water. It is also a meditative, environmental installation and an anchor point as could be defined by neuro-linguistic programming.
In the Indian jungle at blue hour.
The blue hour comes from the French expression “l’heure bleue” which defines the time of sunrise and sunset when the light is dimmed without it being dark yet.
Fugitive but intense especially in the tropics, it is the special moment when animals express their vital frenzy and fear of darkness with shouts and agitation.
Through this video, I question the ancestral memory of our humanity, that of the reptilian brain, in the face of the anguish of the night in the forest.