FIDMarseille continues its collaboration with La Gaya Scienza, a venue for artistic and poetic exploration in Nice. This first autumn event will showcase the work of visual artist, filmmaker and performer Maïder Fortuné, with the screening of two short films presented at previous editions of FID: Communicating Vessels (FID 2020) and Boomerang (FID 2024). The screening will be followed by a discussion with Maïder Fortuné.
COMMUNICATING VESSELS
Annie MacDonell, Maïder Fortuné
Canada, 2019, 35’
Other Gems, FID 2020
Connect several containers at the bottom, pour liquid into one of them, and it will flow between them all until it reaches the same level in each one. This is the principle of communicating vessels. For Maïder Fortuné and Annie McDonell, it is an image of life seen as a stream of thoughts, emotions and influences, good or bad, which circulates between beings, passing from one to another, shaping them, distorting them, connecting them in a common future. It is also the form, the style of a film that invents totally new circuits of meaning between the various elements that compose it. A fiction without a model and a eulogy to the model-less, Communicating Vessels begins with the dissociated, split face of a woman, an art school teacher, who recounts her upsetting relationship with E., a student who is different from the others. Very quickly, the narrative continues, off-screen, with shimmering shots of a succession of educational workshops whose gestures are taken from three famous performances from the 1960s and 1970s. Fortuné and McDonell, themselves artists and teachers, sometimes guide the gestures, sometimes become the subject of the performance. No grand gestures, no proclamations: on the contrary, this praise of transmission, revival and abandonment is an affirmation, through example, of a feminist position on the teaching and practice of art. The teacher/student relationship is like a very serious game of mirrors, somewhere between a Möbius strip and a hall of mirrors, whose intimate truth is the unsettling, because revealing, momentum it generates on both sides. (Cyril Neyrat)
BOOMERANG
Maïder Fortuné
France, 2024, 13’
Other Gems, FID 2024
The inner courtyard of the Canebière building, constructed by Fernand Pouillon in 1952 as his vision of high-quality social housing. The camera slowly follows the vertical and horizontal lines of the windows. Traces of human habitation punctuate the uniformity of the façade (laundry, potted plants). The rhythm syncopates, accelerates: pendulum movements follow the pans, the hubbub of footsteps and voices in the lobby begins a crescendo. The screen goes black, and James Baldwin’s voice speaks in French about the place that French society accords to Algerians. Between the visual section without words and the spoken section without images, there is a thread: the legacy of popular struggles within French society, of their demand for dignity and equality. (Nathan Letoré)