Ange Lempaszak
Germinal Georges - Film - 13min - 2022
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 24
Film
“All that could be seen of the knife was the bone handle, where the gallant motto, the simple word: LOVE, was engraved in black letters.
In the suburbs of Lille, one evening after Christmas, a ritual is being prepared.
His goal: to track down a century-old ghost who holds the keys to a long-buried family mythology.
To bring the spectre out of the rocky beyond in which it slumbers, a game of gin rummy is organised. But who will win, Huguette, Sybil and self-proclaimed matriarch, or Domitille, a bimbo with thousands of followers?
Germinal Georges is a ghost hunt that takes us along the cobbled roads of the Nord-Pas-De-Calais region, tracing the paths of four generations. A mixture of mining roots and scratch cards, from the communist struggle for workers' rights to Judith Butler’s “gender trouble.” The film engages with the fissures Dustan evokes, like Leslie Feinbeirg’s Stone Butch Blues, using a common historical tool of these resistances: political subversion as a tool of emancipation.
This fresco explores the actors of a nuclear family, within generations that no longer have the same codes or the same expectations, so how, in this gap of nearly 100 years, can we recover a genealogical memory that has been silenced?
Ange Lempaszak
Born in Lille in 1997, into the time of Y2K and reality TV, they live and work in Paris.
With humour and aestheticism, in a past- present-future fantasy, as much individual as collective, their work consists of installations, performances and sculptures as much as films, and seeks to produce alternative environments and new forms of narration.
After a first solo exhibition in 2019, "Sunny Day @ The Pool", Ange set up their studio in the Pointcarré cooperative in Saint-Denis, then left it in 2021 to join Le Fresnoy - Studio National.
In 2023, at the invitation of Romain Guillet, they joined the Confort Mental programming collective, an artist run-space located in the 20th arrondissement of Paris.
Production
Credits
› Interprétation : Domitille Lempaszak, Huguette Verdavaine, Dominique Lempaszak, Michel Verdavaine
› Image : David Wojtkowiak
› Montage image : Jérôme Erhart
› Son : Raphaël Zucconi
› Montage son : Médéric Corroyer
› Mixage : Médéric Corroyer
› Accompagnement artistique : Yann Gonzalez & Alain Garcia Vergara