Alexandre Guerre
Acrocosme - Film - 15min - 2016
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 18
Acrocosme is a short film which shows a space trip undertaken after the discovery of an unexpected element on Mars – a piece of tumbleweed, those plants you usually see in Westerns. Tumbleweed symbolises time suspended. It moves where the wind takes it. A journey without a purpose. A wandering. A progression dictated by chance. In this fiction we follow another journey, that of an astronaut who wants to reach this tumbleweed and is trying to cross the dangerous Van Allen belt.
The first steps on the Moon in 1968 were filmed in a studio by Stanley Kubrick. If this rumour remains active in our own times, in light of the technology and resources of the times, what will be said of the first steps on Mars?
Our relation to images has changed since the advent of cinema and television, but what about visual hoaxes? Do we still need the image as truth, to prove a fact?
Alexandre Guerre
Until now, my practice has been based on sound, installation, sculpture, photography, performance and film. But my work is not reflected in the media used, but rather in my experimentation of the latter. I always try to find new ways of exploring, of thinking out of the box, of testing the limits of the media used. Taking a sound recorder instead of a camera to record my trips has gradually changed my perception of the environment. I have learned to prefer apprehending a space by listening even whilst taking a glance. Listening is to imagine, to project, a bit like when you read a book. It is through listening to spaces that my art practice has become more orientated towards a desire to identify the inaudible, the imperceptible that surrounds us.
