Respiro

Camera in hand, Anne-Charlotte Finel explores interstices and boundary zones: between light and darkness, wild and man-made spaces, animal and plant, human and non-human, living and machine, etc. With its exploration of these thresholds, the Respiro exhibition at La Criée centre d’art contemporain offers a visual and aural experience that questions and blurs the contours of our perceptions and representations. 

In Respiro, a first version of which was presented in autumn 2023 at the Centre d’Art de Saint-Fons, Anne-Charlotte Finel draws on a series of recent pieces to create an environment made of darkness and shards of light, of furtive yet slow movements, of blurs, details and materials. To create her sometimes phantasmagorical images, the artist uses only her camera. There’s no mise en scène, just a patient, attentive recording of the living; an alliance between the artist’s eye and the mechano-electronic eye of her camera.

At La Criée, the artist has reconfigured the space of the art centre into three areas, structured by oblique partitions. Each area plunges the visitor into an atmosphere that is both specific and permeable to the neighbouring spaces, through a slight diffusion effect. The ensemble is underpinned by a soundtrack composed by Voiski that reinforces the impression of detachment from reality with its abstract and naturalistic electronic layers.

The first room presents the film Paon (Peacock) in a luminous, vibrant atmosphere. The close-ups and motion effects on the bird’s plumage create a colourful abstraction that challenges our conventional representations of animals and landscapes.

The next space we enter, which is bathed in half-light, is centred around the Klopotec film, which employs a much broader field of vision. In this film Anne-Charlotte Finel focuses her camera on the runways at Orly airport and in particular the surrounding countryside. She films both the planes and the birds taking to the skies. She follows some of the species that have found a home in these Anthropocene grasslands. Here, between the dimness and the haziness of distance, the lines between technology and nature, between the realm of the wild and that of human intervention, are blurred.

The final section of the exhibition features the installation Passagers (Passengers)*, for which Anne-Charlotte Finel filmed and photographed crocodile, alligator, calf and silkworm farms in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Florida, Switzerland and France.

Passagers is composed of a superposition of images, printed on different silks suspended or stretched in a metal structure. It is accompanied by two films – Respiro and Nuit – and other prints. In the midst of all these details, transparencies and opacities, the uncertainty grows even greater: we are no longer quite sure which animal we are looking at, whether it is an animal or a plant or something else, or even if we’re not the ones being watched.

In Anne-Charlotte Finel’s exhibition Respiro, bodies, materials and landscapes superpose and often merge to create a chimera, a surreal environment where the organic and the cosmopolitic resonate.

*Anne-Charlotte Finel produced Passagers as part of a LVMH Métiers d’Art residency in 2022