Camille Llobet

« Each artwork begins with an encounter and a questioning, to be experimented together. I first imagine precise filming devices that take the approach of the filmed experience; I then produce video and sound editing that is both intuitive and aims at a formal radicality.

Two performers try to transcribe, with their mouths, the first minutes of the soundtrack of Sergio Leone’s film «Once Upon a Time in the West» (“Prosody”, 2013). A camera tries to follow the involuntary movements of the mouths of three dancers as they warm up (“Chorée”, 2014). A deaf woman sets out to describe, in sign language, what she sees but does not hear: an orchestra rehearsal (“Seeing what is said”, 2016). High-level athletes mentally rehearse their course during a singular training session in the pillar of a bridge (“Making the music”, 2017). A soprano reproduces, in her adult voice, the babbling of my daughter (“Majelich”, 2018). Nine performers question our perception of the cinematic image through its live description (“Sténoglossie”, 2019). Drawings, texts, scores and performances often address and extend the concerns raised in the videos.

In 2020, I initiated a new long-term project dedicated to the high mountain environment. I felt the need to shift my working protocols – until now focused on orality, movement and human perception – to this complex environment made of rock, ice and snow that is now disappearing. A brutal transformation due to the acceleration of the melting ice and the rocky collapses which brings the geological time down to the level of a human life scale. This research, carried out with high mountain guides and geomorphologists, will give rise to a feature film: a documentary essay in which the narration is created as much through noise and gesture as through voice and image (“Pacheû”, 2023, in production).
Camille Llobet, 2022