La nuit n’en finit plus (“The night won’t seem to end”) (2021 - ongoing project)
Video installation
Duration 2’55 min & 3’22 min, color 9/16 HD
This series of silent video portraits deals with storytelling, oral memory, and intimacy. It repeats the same filming protocol: a femme/ woman recorded themselve recollecting a personal story (it could be anything), then I filmed a second person, in one take, listening to for the first time this memory I was entrusted with; after what I asked the second person I had just filmed to tell in their turn something about them that would be recorded and so on and so forth.
This process attempts to create an indirect encounter between strangers, in the manner of a chain, “borrowing” a story from a person, and passing it on to another one. Filming becomes a pretext for an interaction, leading people to have a one-to-one experience, a mental journey, that can be repeated endlessly. Each personal story responding to the previous one participates to that flow, and they all together form a whole. Diving into people’s experiences, memories, dreams, hopes, fears, anger, love, ardour, drive, and eventually their core, a community is drawn from that collective experience which goes beyond the expression of the spectrum of womanhood - no matter what that term means to each individual who apprehends it differently.
‘La nuit n’en finit plus’ acts as a sort of fire camp - where one finds a confidant whether in an old friend or in a complete stranger during a long night of deep conversations - with remote participants, enabling new paths towards intimacy. I wish thus to create a subjective and ever incomplete yet growing “encyclopedia” not of knowledge but of feelings.