Maxime
Fauconnier

The Waves, 2022

Single-channel video installation, 3 hours, color, no sound, 16:9, 30 fps, site-specific dimensions.

“The Waves” by Virginia Woolf traces the lifetime of six friends through nine chapters, by making parallels to the changing position of the sun and the tides. As they reminisce about their collective past, the characters’ thoughts reverberate in a swarm of colors gliding over the pages. The novel 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.

I imagined an alternative way of experiencing her novel, compiling all the colors mentioned in its pages in chronological order. The resulting work is a film sequencing 675 monochromes, one blending into the next over the course of 3 hours, dreaming up all the colors shaping the events and relationships of a lifetime.