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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Christophe…définitivement

blue on black portrait of Christophe singing

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia, still from Christophe...définitivement, 2022. 86:00. Courtesy of the artists, Anna Lena Films and Haut et Court Doc

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia, Christophe...définitivement

March 2002, the singer Christophe is back on stage after years of absence. The camera, in love, captures, fixes words, sounds, colors and instants. Christophe…définitivement is a film in suspension constructed like an ideal concert. It unravels chronology and transports us from stage to stage, from backstage to Christophe’s home studio and apartment where his passions, fetishes and treasures accumulated over the years are displayed and where his music originated.

 

Directed by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia, Christophe…définitivement, is a feature-length documentary film. Produced by Anna Lena Films and Haut et Court Doc, the film was co-produced by The Vega Foundation and Panthéon Films. An official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, the film premiered on May 25, 2022, and has since been distributed internationally.

 

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is a French artist, born in 1965 in Strasbourg.  Gonzalez-Foerster’s practice is restlessly cross-disciplinary, taking cues from film, literature, architecture, philosophy and critical theory. Through immersive installations that include film or are suggestive of filmic tropes, Gonzalez-Foerster uses the medium of experience as a way to question the essences of objects and the meaning of context. Trafficking in a unique type of psychological collage within works and between them, her varied oeuvre has taken myriad forms, including collected fragments of modernist buildings in Brazil, an autobiographical hanging of 40 years of her own wardrobe, and an immersive light and sound environment meant to evoke the chaos, dread, and wonderment of future lives. In her latest works, the Apparitions, Gonzalez-Foerster uses live performance and holographic projections that conflate characters from history, literature and film with their sociological sources and ramifications. Often relying on elliptical texts that place equal weight on fiction, fact, and the pluralism of memory, Gonzalez-Foerster creates heterogeneous worlds that thrive on the tension between finite and infinite, the empirical and the dramaturgical.   Gonzalez-Foerster is the recipient of the 2002 Marcel Duchamp Award.

 

Since the 1970s, Ange Leccia has been developing a body of work using experimental cinema, video and installation. Since his first uses of the Super 8 in the 1970s, affects have been at the heart of his approach. His aesthetic questions the psyche as a reservoir for memories, dreams, and fantasies. His insertion in the cinematographic field was made through collaborations with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Island of Beauty (1996); Gold (2000), and Malus (2004), but also solo with Nuit Bleue (2011). 

 

His work has been shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim Museum, New York: Documenta, Kassel; Skulptur Projekte, Münster; the Venice Biennale, the Seibu Museum, Hiroshima Art Document, among others.