"In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire"
Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India
December 12, 2022 — April 10, 2023
I am happy to announce that my film “The Beginning of Anything” will be exhibited at the Biennale for Contemporary Art of Kochi-Muziris in India. This Fifth Edition, titled "In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire", will run from December 12th, 2022 until April 10th, 2023.
“The Beginning of Anything” is an experimental found footage film compiling dozens of videos collected on streaming platforms, showing people from all around the world reacting to an immaterial threat: a fog. Kicked off by the very first keyword ‘fog’ typed into a search bar, the work process gradually consisted in searching through a multitude of word associations, targeting specific rhythms, languages, locations or ambiences, and building thematic categories that eventually became narrative instalments.
Constructing “The Beginning” was a matter of dosage, an undertaking for which it was necessary to sense how to assemble without imposing; how to balance interventionism without losing the viewer's trust. My wish is for the film to act as a ‘tabula rasa’ experience that re-examines the link between content and form, while bringing the viewers, the subjects and the material closer and closer together, proposing a subversive definition of the cinematographic object and its boundaries.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is the largest contemporary art festival in Asia, held once every two years in Fort Kochi, Kerala, South India. For each edition, a pavilion is constructed to host performance and cinematic art at Cabral Yard, a one acre campus full of large canopied trees in the heart of Fort Kochi.
"The Beginning of Anything", 2022
Found footage film, 25'15'', color, stereo, 16:9, 30 fps
Filmed by people all over the world, a fog appears.
Concept: Maxime Fauconnier
Story: Maxime Fauconnier & Romain Waterlot
Image editing: Romain Waterlot
Sound editing & mixing: Pierre-Nicolas Blandin
Graphic visuals: Iona Haas
"Titre: Sans Titre"
Caroline Van den Eynden & Amis
DMW Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium
September 17, 2022 — November 10, 2022
"Titre: Sans Titre" is an exhibition commemorating Caroline Van den Eynden, as a person, friend, family member and artist. I present a work that I developed thinking of Caroline, titled "The Waves (colors)".
Released in 1931, “The Waves”, Virginia Woolf’s seventh novel, is considered one of her most daring and challenging. The book traces the lifetime of six friends through nine chapters, from childhood to old age, by making parallels to the changing position of the sun and the tides. As they reminisce about their collective past, their thoughts reverberate in a swarm of colors gliding over the pages.
“The Waves” suggests that every human being is a distinct living unit while simultaneously being a part of every other unit of human life—that is, that we are part of one another. Reflecting Woolf’s concern with capturing the poetic rhythm of life, the intricacies of the mind and the passage of time, the novel questions whether language is capable of embodying everything we want to say.
Inspired by Woolf’s understanding of one's attempts to find a way out of their loneliness, I imagined an alternative way of experiencing her novel, using all the colors mentioned in its pages. The resulting work is a 3-page typewritten text work, dividing all 675 colors in sections corresponding to the nine chapters of the novel. Functioning as an enigmatic formula, the work dreams up all the colors shaping the events and relationships of a lifetime.
"The Waves (colors)", 2022
3 typewritten pages on A4 paper, custom wooden frame, anti-reflective glass, 72 x 40 cm
Edition of 6+2AP