The name of the project Le monde du silence refers to the feature film lasting one hour and twenty-six minutes directed by marine biologist Jacques-Yves Cousteau and 23-year-old film student Louis Malle. The film depicts the underwater explorations of the Calypso in 1955. It begins with a voice-over: “Fifty metres below the surface, men are shooting a film. Equipped with compressed air scuba diving suits, they move freely, oblivious to gravity.” Sailing in the Calypso, the team of twelve divers spent hundreds of hours in the Mediterranean Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The 25 kilometres of film were reduced to 2500 metres in the final editing of the documentary.
As part of the process, details and scenes, close-ups and wide shots were all taken into account. Filming is presented as an act of being: testing, stabilising, bending from the body and neutralising intentions, and enduring contrary acts. I wish to explore such modes of being as an opportunity to make decisions about ways of working.
In an open space the surface is infinite. I recently flew over my village. What had been at the centre was immediately decentralised. At an atypical altitude, through a change of scale, I connected with the position I had in the world, in an everyday context. In addition, I have noticed that in the videos, the exposure of the body holding the camera is 360°.
All this leads me to think about the preparation of the body. Just as an athlete should warm up before intense activity.
When I share photos on Instagram, the distance between what is presented and the person on the receiving end lacks depth; the distance between the visible image and the receiving body is limited. The distance from a mobile phone to a face is a few centimetres.
For the residency CCA-HOSPITALFIELD 2024, I will focus on audiovisual recordings and, in parallel, I will carry out an exercise to adapt the images in three-dimensional space using, as the main resources, first the video camera and, secondly, the printer and paper. I want to explore other ways of looking at the images separate from the devices and of being with the material, returning to the body again and again.
