________ OK KID, YOU GOT THE JOB
Invited in residency for the Estive program, Christophe Herreros initiates the conditions for a film casting during the month of August in the space of the rue Moret.
The particularity of Christophe Herreros’ practice is in the production of short videos that he shows on a loop in installations. In these videos he sets up stereotypical, archetypal productions of cinema and starts them off-screen. Everything is filmed, but everything is hidden, you have to be patient.
Christophe Herreros likes his films to evoke universes, landscapes and settings whose fictional power is recognizable. In his videos, he tries to invoke a kind of ‘retinal reminiscence’ of cinema, painting and TV series. One of the keys to his work is the research on the notions of staging, cinema and the conditions for the appearance of fiction in general.
Christophe Herreros’ proposal for the Estive residency, initiated by GLASSBOX, is to set up the specific conditions for a film casting. On a simple working basis – a pitch, a shot – the actors invited to the casting will be able to improvise a story and a situation as they wish. The GLASSBOX space will be used as a casting and work studio with the aim of producing a final video.
The casting will be open to the street..
Link to YouTube channel of extracts from the castings performed::
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJ9xgiBCV6mPxGNG8jKFfA
Once the casting and rehearsals were completed, a film was made. It is a steady came sequence shot that uses some of the codes from American crime TV series. This was the basis of Christophe Herreros’ work with his actors, reinterpreting and appropriating the codes of this daily popular culture to move them into another field. It is not a caricature, but a kind of mimetic of television culture, a reappropriation with a video art perspective and in the field of visual arts. The short video is played in a loop and the actors seem to be locked in this story of broken promises. The dialogues bring strangeness and discrepancy, they seem to evolve with each loop and offer new elements
During the exhibition, the images of the castings and rehearsals will also be shown. It will thus be possible to recognize the actors selected for the film but also those who have not been chosen and who will still make their appearance in the story. These different moments combined (castings, rehearsals, film) will create a global fiction.
Film produced in collaboration with the Cité internationale des Arts.
________ Upcoming title
The video installation presented by Christophe Herreros is the result of his work during the Estive residency at Glassbox. Rather than making visible the elements necessary for the time needed to mature and make a film – lighting, studio elements, storyboard, script, etc., the display evacuates the decorum referring to the artefacts that constitute the off-screen of film production in order to create a visual discourse that is suspended between diegetic time and production time.
Placed between the two spaces that polarize the exhibition, the spectator is trapped between the monitors broadcasting excerpts from the casting and the flat screen on which the final shape of the film rotates in a loop. Both elements of the project mutually influence their respective readings: the casting acquires a narrative dimension that pulls it towards the cinematographic object when, on the contrary, the film floats between the intermediate waters of filming and post-production.
We think we have access, as in biology, to an unknown stage of development of the species, somewhere between the chrysalis and the moult. It is precisely this state that the artist seeks to show by having chosen a laconic and polar display: neither the different motifs of the film’s childhood, which would have led him to present an abundant installation of equipment necessary for filming, nor its only final form, which would have made him prefer a large projection format and in the dark, but rather this third way, between control monitor and television screen, which allows us to capture the unseen of the film production process, this moment suspended between the project and the object, and whose title can only be upcoming.
Clémence Agnez
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