Vertière n'existe pas, 2018, Gaëlle Choisne
An experimental film produced as a remounted montage, provoking a repetition of the movie with different temporality as if the same story had been remounted several times, always with changes each time. The film is based on the reflections of the author Le Glaunec, who explains how Haitian History has been censored in the History of Humanity. He says and repeats, Vertière n'existe pas, but by dint of repeating it even in its negation, it exists.
Solipsism, 2006, Janet Biggs
An alienating landscape where thrashing underwater dancers, swimming polar bears, and limitless frozen seas pose questions about captivity and free will. Biggs’ subjects are at the problematic intersection of beauty, desire, and restraint. As a theory, solipsism states that all perceptions exist only in an individual's imagination and that there is no reality outside one's mind. Life becomes a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. This nightmarish state of mind can be triggered by time spent underwater or in the twenty-four-hour darkness of arctic winter nights.
Eclipse, 2022, Janet Biggs
Based on Biggs’ trip to the Chilean coast of Antarctica to view a rare total solar eclipse in December 2021. Eclipse interweaves footage from her voyage, subverted by dense fog, with those of navigational methods used throughout time to identify one’s place in the world, poetic texts drawn from myriad sources, and psychological studies of people in extreme isolation. The overt line of inquiry in Eclipse is the demanding, physical, and adventurous voyage; the subtext is introspection, and the meaning of the various ways in which the word ‘eclipse’ can function: light blocked; identify obscured; significance, power, and prominence deprived.
Finis Terrae, 2019, Ali Kazma
Finis Terrae continues the artist’s long-term research into the relationship between time, space, and geography. The video was shot throughout March and April of 2018 in the area marked by the lighthouses Stiff, Kéréon, Phare du Créac’h, La Jument, Phare d’Eckmühl, Saint-Mathieu and Phare de Nividic. Having long been drawn to the profound relationship of time to objects and spaces, Ali Kazma now focuses on the lighthouses as these structures contain many links to the history and the socio-economical make-up of the areas they are located in. Marking the extreme points on the map around the passages and borders between the sea and the land, lighthouses have endured the harsh conditions of nature for centuries while providing safe passage to people in transit.
Safe, 2015, Ali Kazma
Safe is about the global seed vault on one of the Svalbard Islands near Greenland in a zone administered by Norway. The image shows the immaculate environment, the inner walls and pipes, and the shelves on which many metallic boxes are stacked. Here, with the naturally frozen environment, hundreds of thousands of species of seeds are preserved from extinction. Safe leads the viewer to question humanity's active role in the rapid evolution of “nature”.