Manon Le Roy
Continuum - Film - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Film
A woman is walking down a long corridor bordered and overlooked by a vast stretch of water. As she wanders, she is confronted by enigmatic entities, figures like sculptures, frozen as they wait and apparently indifferent to her as she moves about, as if absent... Entirely shot underwater, "Continuum" pursues the research i undertook in swimming pools up to and including an earlier film, "Preludes." total immersion is characteristic of all my work that i place at the overlap between choreography, video, film, and theater. it is based on the quest for a non-temporal space, stripped of all reference save for the slowness of this all-engulfing process, at once fluid, dense, and hieratic. My new project is characterized by immersing several bodies, like intruders, around a central figure. thus solidified in the narrow space of a long corridor, my idea is that these bodies --situated in their setting as pure objects in a plastic composition - should exude a visual sense of rootedness, like phantasmatic apparitions or vaguely recalled figures of the woman who makes her way alone, under the spell of an infinite, decelerated movement.
Manon Le Roy
Manon Le Roy is a video artist who creates experimental choreographic work in which she films human bodies immersed in water, in the form of video films and installations.
Born in France, she graduated from the University of Haute Bretagne (2005, master's degree in Plastic Arts) and the Fine Arts College of Rennes (2006, master's degree DNSEP Art). From 2008 to 2010 she did a two-year post-graduate residency in Video & New Media at Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Contemporary Arts where she directed the videos Continuum and Eleven.
Her work has been shown at international film festivals and in contemporary art spaces, such as the Lisbon International Independent Film Festival IndieLisboa (2010); the Videoformes Festival (2011); the Villa Méditerranée (2013) in Marseille; the Palais de Tokyo (2012), the Centre Pompidou (2009) and the Grand Palais (2008) in Paris; the EYE Film Institute Netherlands (2014) in Amsterdam.
In 2011 Continuum received the first prize at the International Festival of Videodance Il Coreografo Elettronico of Naples and the Barcelona videodance prize at the IDN - Image, Dance and New Media Festival of Barcelona.
