Elsa Brès
STELLA 50.4N1.5E - Film - 15min - 2016
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 18
It’s winter under the heavy sky, the sea has retreated and the wind draws lines of sand on the asphalt roads of Stella, a seaside town in Northern France; it appears soundless and deserted. In the deep night [in the deep of the night], the horizon moves at the pace of the dunes, one by one they engulf the steep plan of the city. In front of this swaying landscape, hands are putting together a heap of documents, collecting and sorting them—drawings, samples, scans of landscapes, thermographies—thus elaborating a manifold, experimental cartography of the city, erecting Stella in a milieu where the relationship between the instability of earthly matter and the authority of geometry becomes graspable. Waiving the traditional opposition between nature and architecture, Stella is a film about work as necessary condition for perception, in which Elsa Brès teaches us how to look at a mutating space. The inside is the place from which we, as would an explorer, a traveller-botanist, an archivist or an archaeologist, reassemble in a constellation the elements that represent and compose the exterior space, from old, framed estate agency views to measures, geological samples and the like. The outdoor space then appears as a collage of forms and stuffs, constantly interpenetrating each other. When the maquette literally melts down on the city maps, a movement of fusion irreversibly blurs the distinction between the building from which the work organizes itself and the surrounding sea of dunes: the buildings are worn away, the landscape is an architecture. Charlotte Bayer-Broc
Elsa Brès
Elsa Brès is an architect. She graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure d'architecture (ENSA) Paris Belleville. She also trained at the University of Montreal and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (Paris). Her work in film, video, drawing and photography forms part of an experimental project on the perception and measure of surrounding contemporary landscapes, particularly the exploration of where matter and time meet. She has taught architecture theory at ENSA Paris Belleville. Her films have notably been shown at the CENTQUATRE (Paris), the Forum des Images (Paris) and at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Paris).
Production
Acknowledgments
Meryll Ampe, Charlotte Bayer-Broc, Raphaël Botiveau, Antoine Brès, Max Brès, Marguerite Catton, Maxence Ciekawy, Adrien Chevrot, Mario Côté, Joris Cottin, Damien Delaville, Régina Demina, Philippe Vadim Demine, Clémentine Fusco, Margot Gallimard, Thomas Guillot, Tamar Hirschfeld, Béatrice Mariolle, Xavier Mariolle, Andrés Padilla Domenes, Gwendal Sartre, Cécile Simon, Antoine Wang.
