Turbulences
Enrique Ramirez, Pablo Helguera, Daphné Hérétakis, Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky
A proposal by Pascale Cassagnau (CNAP) and Josée Gensollen (La Fabrique, Marseille)
Screening at the Petit Plateau, Saturday August 27, 2022 from 4:30 pm
Replay and new presentation from 5:00 pm
Free access
The works gathered here by Pascale Cassagnau and Josée Gensollen, drawing as many fragmented landscapes of a world in crisis, turbulent times and disturbing realities, are films that evoke climatic crises, social and political seditions, celebrating the emancipating value of art.
Pacifico (2015)
Himno (2015)
El Muro (2020)
Cruzar un muro (2012)
Ucum-Leu (2022)
By Enrique Ramirez
Chipilo (2008)
By Pablo Helguera
Ici, Rien (2011)
By Daphné Hérétakis
Don’t Rush (2020)
By Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky, CNAP collection
Enrique Ramirez
1979, Santiago de Chile, lives in Paris and Santiago de Chile
After studying cinema and popular music in Chile, Enrique Ramirez joined Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains where he later had a retrospective. His work has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou, the Pinault Collection, and at several international exhibitions including the 2017 Venice Biennale. The artist blurs the boundaries between video, photography, text, music and object. Sea is the ultimate site of instability, a domain of memory in perpetual movement, a space of narrative projections where the destiny of Chile intersects with the great tales of travel, conquest and migratory flows.
Pacifico, 2015
2’28, HD video, color, sound loop
Pacifico delivers a sublime vision of the ocean, filmed from a cliff in Antofagasta in northern Chile. The ocean appears as a living organism, powerful, impenetrable, but behind its stunning beauty and hypnotic movements, this ocean hides hundreds of bodies that General Pinochet made disappear, thrown into the sea from helicopters, sometimes still alive, weighed down by railway rails. “Sea is a memory but in Chile a grave”.
Himno, 2015
3’02, HD vidéo, color stereo sound
A child who earns his living playing the trumpet in the streets awkwardly sings the national anthem, but students here in Puebla singing in chorus have turned some of the words to truth, justice, reparation. These words in N’AHUATI were shouted by people in the streets after the murder of 43 normalistas.
El Muro, 2020
7’07, HD video color sound, 2 monitors converted to single channel
On one screen the artist has put 70 crosses floating on the surface of the sea. On the other screen a social demonstration in 2019, an uprising demanding a new constitution. Women take turns on the Italia square in the centre of Santiago and beat on the walls to reclaim their rights but also, 40 years later, some of them ask for justice for their children disappeared during the military dictatorship.
Cruzar un muro, 2012
5’43, video, color, sound, French subtitles
Cruzar un muro is a film inspired by the 13th article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. In this film, the waiting room of a public immigration office, located “somewhere”, is the scenario that brings together all the human aspirations of our time. The expectation, the conviction, the desire and the right of each person to dream, to travel, to cross, to circulate and to stay within the borders of each state or to return to their country of origin. All this is metaphorically represented in a scenario of fiction and reality.
Ucum-Leu, 2022
9’28, HD video, sound
In the 2012 film Cruzar un muro, the final scene took place on a raft on Lake Ucum-Leu (where the river ends and the waters merge) and highlighted immigration issues; but this lake is also an ecological and environmental symbol for Chile. Between the 1950’s and 2010 the rainfall has decreased by half. In 2011 the lagoon covered 12 km2 and was 6 meters deep. In 2018 the lagoon disappeared. The influx of tourists, the use of water for avocado cultures and global warming are the cause of a drought. For the artist, this ecological drama is also an attack on the images of his childhood. Located 1h30 from Santiago, it was the place where he learned to swim, to be free. But also for his father, a boat sail maker, the closest place to the sea where he tested the sails in the wind.
Pablo Helguerra
1971, Mexico City
After his studies and a job at the Chicago Art Museum, he joined the Public Education Department at the Guggenheim New York for 8 years, and then MOMA as Director of the Adult and Scholar Program until 2020. Today he teaches at the College of Performing Arts at the New School University in New York. Pablo Helguerra is a multidisciplinary artist known for his socially engaged performances.
Chipilo, 2008
15’, black and white, sound
Chipilo is a documentary based on the history of a town near Pueblo, Mexico. Around 1880 the government of Porfirio Paz sought to populate certain areas of Mexican land with Catholic European immigrants, fantasizing that these arrivals would enrich the culture and economy of the region. But in this city, a micro-community kept its traditions and a language that had disappeared without knowing its country of origin.
Daphné Hérétakis
Daphné Hérétakis studied cinema at the Paris 8 Saint-Denis university and at the Fresnoy, national studio of contemporary arts. She makes films between documentary and fiction and is interested in the relationship between the intimate and the collective and/or the politic, like in “Ici rien” (2011), “Archipels, granites dénudés” (2014), “Au revoir” (2016) et “Les Algues dans tes cheveux” (2016). At the moment she prepares a full-length feature named “On s’embrasse dans des discothèques sombres et je t’explique” which participated at the Sundance Mediterranean Screenwriters Lab, LIM Less is more (Groupe Ouest), programme Émergence and which received Initiative Films Development Award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival.
Ici, Rien, 2011
29’, color, sound
“A shooting started in September 2008, in Exarchia, the center of the Athenian protest movement. During my trips between Paris and Athens until April 2011, the political situation in Greece kept changing. The film became the canvas on which the personal stories finally laid, thus composing the fragmented landscape of a country in crisis.” wrote the woman filmmaker. Her film is a diary that becomes an archive of our time.
Elise Florenty, Marcel Türkowsky
Don’t Rush, 2020
53’, color, sound, CNAP collection
Don’t Rush is a kind of sound project putting the radio space into perspective. The film invites us to take the time to listen to the program of the main character Giannis dedicated to the historical musical form of Rebetiko born in the poor suburbs of Athens in the 1910s, composed by Greek exiles returned from Turkey. In this listening room, from which Giannis is commenting on the songs, several other characters are sleeping, smoking hashish. The soundtrack forms a continuous stream of songs, music and voices. The misty film is made of bursts of images, shadows, reflections. The songs of the historical Rebetiko, made of the narration of clandestine forms of resistance, reflect the contemporary situation in Greece.
