Innovative Curatorial Projects – Paris / SingaporeXavier Baert
*France. Lives and works in Paris, France.
Xavier Baert has been making movies since 1999, mostly on silver-halide film. He is also a programmer at the Cinémathèque de la Danse and a member of the artist-run film laboratory Etna. His movies are caracterized by the image of a dreamed body, dancing, and lustful, and by the nakedness. His practice evolves from film to film, and combines different formal treatments in a never-ending quest of the sublime. Being a filmmaker with an eclectic knowledge, he claims the influence of «traditional filmmakers (Wong Kar Wai, Ferrara, De Palma) as much as experimental ones such as Soukaz, Lemaître, Almuro, whose common point would be the radicality of authorship. Xavier Baert and his danser Cyril Accorsi were recently greeted as residents at the Centre National de la Danse in order to extend their artistic collaboration.
Empreinte [with Cyril Accorsi] / France / 2004 / 12' / 4:3
‘This birth of the human silhouette metonymically takes us back to the origins of cinema, to Marey or Muybridge’s pre-cinema. Baért with his model wanted to re-find the dancer Loie Fuller’s aerial movements such as one can see in Fire Dance (1901). This research for origins continues with the malleability of the ‘imprints’ of the dancer and the circulation of materials and lights.(…) Imprint plays, from the point of view of form, with the material, the identity, the hybridization between film and skin, material and light (…), towards the constitution of a new organism where skin and celluloid acquire an even esthetical status, a true melting pot of malleable images and thoughts.’ Raphael Bussan, Bref no. 65 March-April 2005