Yuyan Wang
Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel
Saradibiza & Amal Guichard
Kevin Elamrani-Lince & ssaliva
The Moon Also Rises, dir. Yuyan Wang, 2022, full HD video, colour, sound, 17 min. 53 sec.
Wang’s film is inspired by China’s 2018 initiative to launch three artificial moons for endless daylight. The film envisions a drift into the eternal glow through a nocturnal society dominated by relentless efficiency portraying a collective hallucination sustained by everlasting activity, accessibility and connection. Lethargic crowds are immersed in fluorescent landscapes while machines enter a trance-like state performing repetitive tasks on the production line of luminous gadgets. Haunted by memories of omnipresent brightness, people search for the fossils of light within the mineral dust tracing the ‘light’ back to its earthly origins. Guided by Édouard Glissant’s call for le droit à l’opacité (the right to opacity), the film contemplates the myth of immaterial new technologies, offering an enigmatic interplay between technology, light and darkness in our modern world.
LA, dir. Kevin Elamrani-Lince & ssaliva, 26 min. 41 sec.
A short film made by Parisian director Kevin Elamrani-Lince during late spring 2021, in collaboration with music producer and audiovisual artist ssaliva. This contemplative painting came to life as a collective walking in the ‘indeterminate’, void-like surroundings of the city of Liège, Belgium. A musical and visual piece in three acts, LA is an extension of Landscapes, a book showcasing more than 100 artworks from audiovisual artist ssaliva which was published by the Paris-based collective Land Arts in December 2021.
Bébé Colère, dir. Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, 13 min.
The last investigation by the filmmakers of media structures in contemporary cinema. A default CGI animated child is confronted with modern subjectivity and world coming-of-age issues, making animation a gloomy tool to subdue modern narrative feelings in favour of despair and microdosed hope. Animation-based routines and easy portraiture of desolation are strategically organised as a grim dark toon.
TSVF, dir. Saradibiza & Amal Guichard, video game playthrough
A new collective project presented by the two visual artists. Released at the Charity Chapel of Arles as part of Faire Monde Festival, this video game follows the narrative of inanimate objects and animals as a parable of deep relational and personal crises, and features a soundtrack made by musician Oklou.
About the artists
HE4RTBROKEN is a Belgian collective bringing unapologetically emotional music into the club. Focusing on feelings and reinvention rather than on a certain musical genre, it offers a safe haven to the lone souls longing for a dance floor to cry on and a communal cathartic experience. Promoting nights since 2015, the collective also hosts a monthly show on NTS Radio.
Yuyan Wang (b. 1989, China) is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the impact of image creation in media, representation and the attention economy. Both poetic and political, her practice focuses on the mutation of the industrial production chain of images, whose endless development leads to an abstraction of reality. Through repurposing images, her films reverse and challenge the images’ functions and meanings, breaking down the hierarchies between found, processed and created material. By utilising editing, sound and immersive environments, Wang alternates between creating focus from distraction and creating ambiguity from clarity. Her previous works were screened at Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Tate Modern and Indie Lisboa.
For more than ten years, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel have been weaving together a body of work that has no equivalent within French cinema. Whether through their first feature film Jessica Forever (2018), or through their numerous short and medium-length films (Martin pleure, 2017; Notre héritage, 2015; or Tant qu’il nous restera des fusils à pompe, 2014, which won the Golden Bear at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival), they follow the destiny of their own generation (they are both less than 35 years old). This is a generation that feeds on heroism through the virtual, a generation that met porn before love and online violence before friendship, a generation for which the video game is its lost paradise.
Credits for TSVF by Saradibiza and Amal Guichard:
Direction and development: Saradibiza
Production: Extramentales Arles
Co-writing: Naia Combary and Gil Gharbi
Music: Oklou
Sound design: Lucien Krampf
Scenography: Juliette Gelli and Aleksandre Kontini
Visuals and drawings: Amal Guichard
3D artist: Sebastien Rabaste
Translation: Ana Madjison
Voice recording: Géraldine Baux
Voices: Ana Madjison, Christopher Soetan, Casey MQ, Gil Gharbi
Amal Guichard (aka Amal Crossing) is a French-Morrocan visual artist born in 2000. Working with different media, she incorporates drawings to digital images to create dreamlike collages and animations. Her work takes inspiration from reminiscences of her childhood and the escapism found in video games.
Paris-based artist and designer Sara Dibiza has been operating in quantum realities since finding the infinite bounds of 3D art. Sara Dibiza’s works come from somewhere raw and primal, as ‘mental projections’ of interpersonal conflicts and trauma, captured in short clips blending sound, allegorical imagery, and movement. Being well-versed in CGI, 3D, and real time rendering allows her to be involved in an array of projects, such as the galore ⁿⁱᵍʰᵗᵈʳⁱᶠᵗ immersive live experience of Oklou for Boiler Room and Casey MQ’s music video ‘Celebrity Crush’.
Kevin Elamrani-Lince is a Parisian director born in 1988. A self-taught filmmaker with a unique documentary style, he has produced music videos and films for Oklou, Krampf, TDJ, Lauren Auder, Shay, Joke, Tristesse Contemporaine, Qoso, Maud Geffray, Lala &ce, Triplego, Koché and many others. He has also directed two experimental feature documentaries about the Casual Gabberz crew and hardcore and gabber culture, Inutile de fuir (2017) and Hard <3 (2022).
ssaliva is mostly known for being a prolific music producer, having worked with artists such as Bladee, Yung Lean, SKY H1 and Palmistry. His approach to visual arts is similar to music in terms of process, stretching images and melodies, compressing them, adding colours and samples until they become part of his own vision. Sometimes ghostly, sometimes sacred, an instantly recognizable form of melancholia. Recalling a wide variety of references from the fields of photography, painting, landscape architecture and internet art, Ssaliva’s paintings bear witness to a wistful sensitivity to urban and rural exploration.
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