An edition of 5 collages, 70×100 cm, edited by Edition 5

A selection of 6 portraits from a series of 30.


92×74cm, Ilfoflex on Aluminium

Installation views at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo

The first installation of Tornadoes of My Heart is titled Kill me twice, dear friend, dear enemy.
This installation is composed by two large video projections placed side by side on the same wall. This double projection presents two boys of seventeen years old, two friends gone for a walk in the middle of nowhere. They are like two blood brothers, and we enter in their violent intimacy, the particularity of their relationship.
The videos draw their portraits, showing the power of their bounds and secret expectations. Edited according a elaborate system of loops and axed around the main sequence of images showing a tornado, this installation places the viewer directly in the heart of this « love/hate » relationship, deep inside this exclusive friendship at the specific moment where the two teenagers’ lives is about change forever, where through death the two of them will become one and unique body.

Installation view at Art Unlimited, Basel, Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Installation video shot at Nichido Contemporary/NCA in Tokyo

Videostills

The second installation is titled Floating, crashing, spinning, spitting, kissing, beating over and over, not to
stop feeling.
About the life of a teen community, its rules and behaviours, this installation is composed of six video presented simultaneously on six identical monitors. This work introduces a group of teenagers left alone in some no man’s lands. Together they draw their territories, create their own codes and language. We follow them in their kingdom : under a highway bridge, in a car cemetery, in abandonned field and motels. The videos show intense close-up of the teenagers’ faces, their looks and gestures. Those sequences are edited together with long travelings of tornadoes and empty landscapes. The violence is growing and spinning around and around like a tornado. It is a way to draw the very specificties that bind bodies and places.
This installation plungs the viewer inside those kids’ first emotions, waving between tenderness and roughness.

Installation view at Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, St Gervais, Geneva

Installation view at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo

Video Stills

The third installation is titled Le Journal de Jack.
This installation is composed of five video projections, beamed directly on the walls.
Of various sizes and placed on the four walls of the exhibition room, the projections are embracing the whole space, surrounding the viewer. This installation is accompanied by music and also by the voice over of one teenager named Jack.
This installation is his intimate diary. It shows his dreams, the relationship with his mother and his best friend, his memories. Little by little the images draw on the walls the physical and the mental surrounding of the teenager, as if Jack was writing his story directly on the walls of his bedroom. The image of the tornado is also a central element of this installation.

Installation views at Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris

Installation views at Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo

Videostills

Installation views. Four billboards spread in Tokyo presenting a sequence especially edited for it. It shows two teenagers with a rescue stick climbing the emergency staircase of an abandonned motel.

Video Stills

Tornadoes of My Heart is the generic title of a body of works which includes three video installations, a series of thirty photographs and a feature film.
In this whole project I developed the theme of teenagehood through his various aspects : the rituals and languages, the friendships, family and the relationships inside a community, the diary.
This whole project started by the writing of the screenplay for the feature film titled Rollow.
Once the screenplay written I organized several castings in order to find the teenagers who would act in the film. My wish was to work with unprofessionnal actors, some very dynamic energies.
As soon as the technical team was complete and the teenagers selected, we rehearsed all together everyday during a period of two months before the shooting of the film. During this period I met each teenager’s family, spent time in each one’s environment in order to know them better. All these preparation phases, close to the way of making a documentary film, brought a lot to the project and created a very strong intimacy that could be felt afterwards in the final images.
After the rehearsal period, we shot the project during two months in summer. In the end, we had more than fifty hours of film material : some filmed sequences were made for Rollow, others for the video installations.
Shot in a very intimistic way by a small team, the images are often very physical and close to the bodies. The project is based on this idea to film scenes of fiction as in a documentary film. The camera was always on and shooting almost all the time. We were all moved by the immergency of catching all the kids’ spontaneous gestures and gazes, all those very fragile and thiny attitudes that happen only once and that can never be repeated. This was a way to blow the limit between the reality and the fiction.
About the photographic series, it started right after the filming of the project. At the end of the summer I organized a photo shooting with each teenager without the technical team. In a calmer atmosphere we went back to each location of the filming. I wanted to take very intimate and intense portrait of each of them, to catch who they really were without them having to play a part. So I asked them to look straight to the camera in a very simple way.
We shot about one thousand photos in total. In the end I made a selection of thirty of them.