Marine Hugonnier

February 24, 2022: Russian troops are flooding into Ukraine. After the initial shock, how do you respond? For Marine Hugonnier, it was by using her own weapons – film and images – driven by what she describes as, “a desire to create a common front and a common image”. This is her declared agenda. She takes a two-pronged approach, first travelling to the Polish border and filming once she arrives. Then, transporting supplies to Kyiv. Despite the fact these images were shot in March 2022, the troubling paradox is that they already seem to bear the weight of history. This is like a frozen moment, at the point when the war had only just become a threat rather than a reality crushing both bodies and the landscape.

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Shot in Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny (France) this film is a search for its cusp — a possible point of passage, set at the limit of the scope of representation and at the beginning of the animal and the vegetal realms. The film shows the microscopic ecosystem that constitutes Monet’s “pictorial Garden”. It is an attempt to capture it from a non-perspectival point of view. Shot as a single sequence running the duration of a 400-foot reel, it features views of the edges of water-lily’s leaves and of Monet’s iconic green bridge, until the lens of the camera is intentionally removed to place the analogue film directly in contact with the environment, recording its presence with no interface. The abstract image resulting from this process captures the shimmering lights and movements of all beings during this quiet summer night.

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With CINETRACTS, Marine Hugonnier adopts and revives, all by herself, that collective form that was practised in May ’68 by an entire profession in revolt. With an irony worthy of Félix Fénéon, she samples a series of both pure and rectified readymades, and offers us not only one of the most potent promptuarium in our time, but also an examination of the ideological and critical roles that images play within it. As for GIVERNY’S CUSP, it stages a confrontation between analogue film and the paintings of Claude Monet.

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Filmed in his home in Paris one late summer, the philosopher and political figure Antonio Negri takes as a starting point a short story — a parable written by Marine Hugonnier — and transforms it into a political hypothesis. It is the story of a community of children who live in roofless houses in a world where two suns shine permanently. When an eclipse is about to take place, the children get scared. They are terrified as they do not know the darkness, they’ve never seen the stars. To cope with their fear, they decide to burn their houses to generate light. From there Antonio Negri weaves anecdotes, evokes Alexis de Tocqueville and Saint Francis of Assisi, protests against biopolitics and formalises arguments which reveal his unconditional engagement for activism, absolute democracy, the need to recreate communities, and his restless quest to find joy in the heart of “the multitude”.

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With CINETRACTS, Marine Hugonnier adopts and revives, all by herself, that collective form that was practised in May ’68 by an entire profession in revolt. With an irony worthy of Félix Fénéon, she samples a series of both pure and rectified readymades, and offers us not only one of the most potent promptuarium in our time, but also an examination of the ideological and critical roles that images play within it. As for GIVERNY’S CUSP, it stages a confrontation between analogue film and the paintings of Claude Monet.

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This film is a study of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite (2nd century AD) in the Musée du Louvre.

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Shot in the mountains of Austria, Apicula Enigma (translated as the ‘bee’s riddle’) follows the journey of a bee colony. Hugonnier eschews conventions associated with nature documentaries – there is no narrative, staged content or scripted voiceover – instead the film shows the sequence of events as they happened on set. The artist deliberately exposes the process of production, revealing the camera, sound recording equipment, even the film crew. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from historical and literary accounts to recent studies of bee behaviour, Hugonnier considers how the colony and its activity mirrors the world as a whole. Central to this is the idea of the beehive as a camera obscura, a compelling metaphor which is alluded to throughout the course of the film.

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Travelling Amazonia was shot on the Transamazonian Highway, about 2,600-mile-long road cutting through Amazonia's vast forest. The construction of the Transamazonia generated industries around the extraction of natural resources like metal, wood, and rubber. In this film, these materials are used to build a dolly and tracks to realise a travelling shot upon this road. Through the realisation of this camera movement, which re-enacts the idealism of the Transamazonian project, this film addresses the processes and pioneering ideas invoked by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the building of this highway.

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This film was shot in Ramallah, Palestine, a few hours before the official announcement of the death of the president of the Palestinian National Authority, Yasser Arafat, on 11 November 2004.

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Ariana tells the story of a film crew that sets out to visit the Pandjsher Valley in Northern Afghanistan. Described in classic Persian poetry as a ‘paradise garden,’ the impenetrable nature of the valley and its lush, fertile landscape have set it apart from the rest of the country and encouraged a history of independence and resistance. Hugonnier’s film considers how the specificities of a landscape help to determine its history. After the crew is unable to film the valley from a vantage point in the surrounding Hindu Kush mountains, Ariana becomes the story of a failed project that prompts a process of reflection about the ‘panorama’ as a form of strategic overview, as a cinematic camera move, and its origins as pre-cinematic mass entertainment.

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Travelling Amazonia was shot on the Transamazonian Highway, about 2,600-mile-long road cutting through Amazonia's vast forest. The construction of the Transamazonia generated industries around the extraction of natural resources like metal, wood, and rubber. In this film, these materials are used to build a dolly and tracks to realise a travelling shot upon this road. Through the realisation of this camera movement, which re-enacts the idealism of the Transamazonian project, this film addresses the processes and pioneering ideas invoked by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the building of this highway.

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