I promise I’ll come and rescue you, I promise I’ll come and rescue you

Yes, very much. The installation enables free roaming: the spectator can enter, leave, choose the duration of the exhibition, edit his own film by moving about. It was a solitary experience. There is something that is more shared in cinema, that resembles the art of books, of the stage. We agreed to cross through the piece together, in a shared temporality. 

I think this particularly changes the relationship to hypnosis that the videos creates. In the exhibition, the loops almost exist as independent objects. They loop all day long even if nobody is watching. One can see the image before putting on the headphones and hearing their meaning. In cinema they become fragments of one same movement. The repetitions, the echoes, the ruptures in the tone answer each other more strongly. The film therefore seems less like a collection of videos than a single thought undergoing a  transformation. With DMRA we obviously had to re-edit the film for its “cinema adaptation”. I think that its form will continue to evolve. Cinema also accentuates a feeling of abandonment. In a gallery, the body stays active ;  in the cinema, the body settles. This facilitates the intermediate state that interests me : between contemplation and investigation, between floating attention and extreme concentration. 

I also enjoy the idea that a promise can be collectively watched. “I promise I’Il come and rescue you” is about an intimate sentence, a sentence that is almost secret, but cinema makes it a shared experience.

I have long been interested in objects and shapes from everyday life. Images from banks of images are images that everybody is familiar with, without really knowing them. They are conceived to be immediately readable. They seem to hide nothing. 

It was precisely this that I found interesting: searching for their flaws. 

When I looked at these images, I tried to concentrate on what they were not saying. The off-screen, the secondary detail, the involuntary gesture, the movement that escapes the main screenplay. I wanted to look at these images as we look at an object for a very long time, until it stops being familiar. 

I didn’t choose the videos for what they represented but for what they revealed despite themselves. Someone running, somebody cleaning a window, an athlete repeating a movement: all these actions already contain a secret narration. They become some kind of physical score. Image banks are often conceived to illustrate an idea. My desire was, on the contrary, to disillustrate them. To open a space where they could start producing mystery again. 

I believe these images are ordinary mythologies of our time. 4K stained-glass windows. They make up a massive reservoir of exemplary behaviors, of exemplary gestures, of idealised lives. Diverting them enables me to reveal the cracks that characterise these stories.

I was guided by the repetitions themselves. 

I believe that watching something many times is a deeply transformative experience. 

When an image returns, it never returns exactly the same. It’s our gaze that changes. Our thoughts shift, our projections shift, our interior state shifts. 

The post-synchronisation principle was central. It is an artificial technique that relates nonetheless  with something we constantly do: associate thoughts to images that don’t have, to start, anything to do with each other. We constantly interpret the world in this way. 

I have often thought of this work as a type of magnetism. Two elements meet, push each other away, contaminate each other. Then another arrives, changes the balance, and so on. 

On the scale of 40 images, it was about creating a sort of mental image. Some videos are very similar to an illustration, other ventures far from it. This oscillation is important. I wanted the spectator to never settle into a stable interpretation method. 

I didn’t want a voice that explained or told a story. I was looking for a more interior voice, something that reassembled the sentences that we sometimes repeat over and over to ourselves without really knowing why. 

Some of these sentences resemble mantras, or auto-persuasions, sometimes they seem like an attempt to console. Some are more parasite like thoughts or mental loops. What interested me was their rhythm as much as their significance. 

The interpretation of the voices was built around visible gestures on screen. As with dubbing, we had to sometimes embrace the physical dimension of the action. The voice did not comment on the image; it tried to inhabit its breathing, its pace, its effort. 

With DMRA, we very soon decided that the music could not be separated from the writing. It did not intervene afterwards to accompany the images. It participated in building a meaning. 

His work particularly interested me because he often builds sonic spaces that seem familiar before shying away. This joins my vision of the images in the sound bank: something familiar becoming strange. 

The music supports the state of contemplation produced by the slow-motion and the repetitions, but it acts as a forced displacement. It constantly modifies our way of receiving the speech. This ambiguity is essential. I wanted the voice and the music to form a single mental image.  

This project makes me think of an attempt to save the images themselves. As if these standardised videos, made in order to illustrate general concepts, were torn away from their primary use in order for them to find an interior life. 

I am also stricken by the fact that 40 videos seem to work as 40 interpretation exercises. Not interpreting a person but interpreting a gesture. As an actress interprets a text or a tightrope walker interprets gravity. 

Another idea is that the promise of the title acts as a key to an impossible reading. Each video seems to be searching for someone to save, without us ever knowing who. Maybe the character to save is the image itself? Maybe even the thought? Maybe it’s the spectator? 

Finally, it seems to me as if the film asks a quiet, very contemporary, question: how does one find mystery in a world saturated by images? The answer suggested is not to produce new ones but to look differently at the ones that already exist. Until they become unfamiliar. Until they start to speak again.