 Good evening, everyone. Good evening, Clément Kojitor. Hello, good evening. Hello. So welcome to Clément Kojitor. And I want to first of all thank you, Clément, for being with us tonight and for having accepted to be part of this online public program that we have launched with the Moodham at the end of October. Tonight is our third appointment with you. And before starting our conversation, I would like just to give a brief introduction about your work. So Clément is the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2018 with Evil Eye, the film that we are presenting on our Mi Family platform. Clément covers in his large numbers of film a different range of subjects, as the perception of reality, the primitivism, the survival of the sacred, the symbol of figures taken from apocalyptic stories. His work analyzes the relationship between humans and images, keeping as a main focus the value of the transcendent and the importance of belief in life. And I'm thinking now about two of your films. One is Nile Sial Nile Athech, Neither Heaven Nor Earth, where you are documenting a military campaign of soldiers in Afghanistan. And at a certain point, mysteriously, suddenly the soldiers disappear completely from the scene as if something supernatural happened beyond our imagination. And I'm also thinking about Bragino, another film that is actually more a documentary where you are focusing your attention on the relationship between two families who are living in the Bragino village in Siberia, and they are living in a very bizarre way. They want to live independently from each other. They want to be separated. They even built a barrier in the village in order to keep distance from each other. So they are kind of struggling between different feelings in their lives, from one side the fear of each other, but from the other side we can say the joy of living in such a wonderful natural landscape. This documentary has been declared by Tellerama as a crazy ambition, as a wonderful rare masterpiece. And in one interview, you also declared your film as a way to narrate about human beings' deepest fear. Now I'm interested in knowing more about your consideration of human fears. You are also talking about fear in the evil eye. This word is coming back a few times in the film. What are today the deepest fears, Clément, you want to investigate to explore? First of all, thanks a lot for this invitation. I'm very happy to be here with you and the team of Moudam for this talk. Concerning the fears, first of all, I think that fiction and exploring narratives is a way to cohabit with something that you don't really understand from the world or from yourself and that can also create fears. And it's also a way to cohabitate with these fears. And I think the situation for me in my work changed a lot the last two, three years, but I think the world changed so much and so quickly the last few years. So I think it's not anymore so much about which fears, but how to deal with those fears, how to go through those fears, how to face those fears. And that's what I'm really aware and what I'm really working on, because I think that now in some way fears are everywhere, fears of disease, fears of ecological collapse, of solitude in this situation. Yeah, fear is growing in a way, maybe not for so long, but now it's not so much about which fears, but how to face it. I think that I'm interested to express that in my work or how to deal with those fears. Yes, and I think we can definitely see your point of view in the evil eye. This is a film that has been designed specifically for the Marcel Duchamp Prize. You draw inspiration from US advertising imagery. If I'm not wrong, you took the idea during a journey you made in US where you have seen a child face used as a political advertising campaign. You then got the idea of the film, meaning that you decided to acquire the rights of all the images from the world's most famous images banks such as get your shutter stock, which usually use these images for a political or advertising purpose, and you completely decontestualize the images. You use the images in order to create your visual universe in a film format. And the main character of this film is the figure of the woman. The woman is present as a child as a young woman as a grown up as an adult, even the names of the US tornadoes are actually women and you are listing them at the beginning of the film. You're referring, I think to the cliche of the female figure who appears in some moments to be happy to be smiling and in some others to be really sad. A woman like Eve, we can say that has been tamed and then she failed. And the woman is also present not only through the images but also through a voice over who is there is this voice who is reciting a plea that is actually written by yourself. And I can say that is like a kind of an apocalyptic verdict that is proclaiming the difficulties, the fears, the obstacles that we are all facing in our life. You are kind of announcing the end of the world that is addicted to consumerism and to materialism. Now, I would like to let you talk about the structure of this film and what is the message you want to transmit? I don't think there is any like precise message but at the very beginning actually I saw this picture when I was in New York but I saw one picture of a child I saw twice in the same day. The first time was on a packaging of, I don't know, something in the grocery, something to eat, you know, and there was a face of a kid smiling. And maybe a few hours later I just recognized the same image of the same child on a big billboard. It was for the Trump election in 2016. And I just had the kind of, I just remarked that the same kid, the same image was used in what has been sold by his parents some years ago. And now this image is like a ghost that can fill an emptiness in terms of, in terms of products but also for an ideology. And I just was wondering who are those faces, who are those bodies that are in this kind of catalog. And I just tried to look to explore the database from Getty, Shutterstock, which is mainly a big catalogue of stereotypes and déjà vu. You have this feeling that you know each image, you know each expression of the body of the face, but you saw it already in the cinema, in the advertising, it's only images that you recognize and that's how it works because it called your memory, our collective like Western memory mainly, but also from the kind of section for all the part of the world. But it's mainly a white Western imaginary. And I was quickly overwhelmed by the presence of women in the database of the female body of the female faces. It's such a cliche, it's from the very early ages of advertising is that the body of the woman is create more desire and is better to sell something. So, little by little I came that I had to use this image is not to sell something or to work on ideological purpose but try to express kind of any story related to those characters who seem to me was haunting this place. Little by little, I was exploring this idea of the female character in the, let's say, Judeo-Christian Western mythology from the Bible to today. And one of the, one of the things really interesting is that in our mythologies, the evil come from the woman, the violence from the man, but the evil from the woman. And that's why until a few years ago, the names of the hurricane was only woman, maybe. And a few years ago, maybe in 2015 or 2016, they decided to share the, you know, to make it one female name and one main name. But before it was only woman, female name for the hurricanes. But I was really interested in this female figure from Eve to the witch from the woman who bring the evil in the community. And which is a well, which is a way to, in French, we say le bouquet-missaire, you know, the scapegoat, or like, you know, in the community, there is one element who was accused to have brought the evil in the community. So, little by little, I can, through this kind of elliptical experimental story and trying to express things that were hidden in the images, because maybe after 15 years of working with video images, editing, sound, language. And I know, I'm so much convicted that you can, one image can express one thing and he's totally opposite, depending on the context. So it was about a lot of, about revealing something hidden in the image by the context and by the editing. How the image dialogue with the sound, with the language, and how, which energy and which emotion is conducted in the shot at this precise moment. So it was like a laboratory with sound words and images. Thank you, Clément, for this explanation. And it's interesting that you said at the beginning that the image of the child when we were talking about the beginning is like a ghost of an ideology. And then now you said that, of course, what you want to express is trying to explore things that are hidden in the images. We are actually living now in a generation in an era where we are completely bombarded by images, by news, by information. Everything must be connected in the quickest possible time. But sometimes for us it's also difficult to distinguish what is real from what is fiction, from what is invention. So we are definitely living in a stereotype society. And I would like to know what do you think about this debate between reality and fiction, reality and artificiality real and fake? A lot of my work is focused on this very, very tiny line in between. We don't know really if is it about facts or is it about fiction or is it something real or something that we are dreaming. And I think our brain, our spirit is a mechanism who is always producing fiction. If we think about our childhood, I think half of our memory of what we think about our childhood is a fiction we created ourselves. Or people told us things about our childhood when we were little by little. It's a big mixture between some things that really happened and some things that we think that happened those ways, but we probably build up some memories. And I think our lives in this process is until our death is still acting. And fiction in some way in literature, theater, art and opera, cinema is a way to question how this use of fiction is how there is maybe two extreme like the first one is poetry and the other one is lying and fiction can be in between these two extremes. But now the situation has been so is now so much complicated with because this the presence of fiction has now totally connected to science to journalism to ideology to political that it's in a way it's, it's so much difficult to it's not anymore play or it's more a metaphysical question to explore on stage or in our books or in our screens it's, it's about not being lost in, in what we think is the reality and this reality is building our community, you know, and I think that a community starts when people are telling themselves the centuries. And but what about when those stories are dangerous lines or dangerous. So this borders is, is not really clear and won't never be really clear but what strikes me so much now it's how it's unclear in so many levels in so many fields in of our lives and especially in the political and scientific fields. Thank you, Clement. Now, I just want to ask you a last question, because I think we're running almost out of time about another amazing project you have made the Amoros Indus that is a short film it was born as a short film as a adaptation of an opera ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau from 1753. And then you re-adapt this music, putting it in dialogue with modern dancers, cramped dancers, break dancers, hip hop dancers, and you create this very intense dialogue between the strength of the dance and the spiritualism of the music. You had also the opportunity to present this project as a real performance as a show at the Opera in Paris. And I just would like to ask you a little bit more about this amazing project, which is a little different from the Evil Eye. Yes, both projects. I mean, the video and the opera stage production was produced and commissioned by Opéra Nationale de Paris. And at the beginning, it's part of the 3rd Seine third video collection, which is a kind of carte blanche that Opéra Paris gives to visual artists, filmmakers, writers in order to direct a short video related in some way to the opera world. And when Philippe Martin, the artistic director, asked me to do something for this collection, I immediately thought about one idea I had in mind since a few years and I was just waiting for the opportunity to direct it. And it was this famous, very famous piece in the Baroque French music, which is very, very known. And I was listening to this music that I really love. I was hearing some deep tension and deep forces that could maybe welcome or invite some other dancing energies and bodies and personality that it's usually made for, you know, because it's part of an opera ballet, so it's made for dancers and singers and dancers on stage. And I was wondering what kind of dancers I could invite from that and making research, I discovered Trump and I immediately recognized in the movement the tension I saw in my mind when I was listening to the music. And so in some way, I think that staging is a way to set up meetings between elements, landscapes, bodies, faces and music and to bring them together and to film this meeting. And so we shot one day at the stage of Opera Paris. And me, the dancers, the choreographers, we immediately felt something strong happening between all of us and the music. And that there was something revealed from the music with their dancing and with them and yes. And then a few days after I finished the video, I showed to the director of Opera Paris, the Fanisner, which is the first audience for the video before they are screened or launched. And then invited me to stage the whole production, the whole piece of the opera, which is not six minutes as the first video I made, but three hours of opera with singers, choreographers and of course dancers and to work on this piece with which is a very problematic political piece coming from the movements, but also colonialism, from the French colonialism at this moment. And so it was also a way to understand and to work more deeply on what kind of tension was in this piece. And because the tension in the crump music are really strong and come from a political conflict in USA after the aggression of what they came by the police. And in the riots in LA, I think it's 1992. And then little kids and teenagers and young adults start to dance to express the political violence and tension they felt. All these tension are about political tension and the whole work was about to dialogue with history, with ideology and with this hidden tension in the music and to express it, to reveal it with the body. Thank you, Clement. I wish I could see it actually in Paris. I really want to thank you for this amazing talk. I would like to also conclude then underlining the beauty of your films of your project where we are completely hypnotized by your images by the power of your narration. You're able to create, I can say, a new immersive visual universe where images generate the model and the model generates the images and it's the question that arise from your images. I can say it's not a question of confrontation but more of an encounter from the image originates a language and our faculty of imagination. And our mind is completely floating in your visual immersive language, guiding us towards a new reality that we can explore both with our eyes and with our mind. And I invite at this point the public who is listening to us to immerse themselves into your universe and to be kind of included in your vision and in your world. So thank you, Clement, very much. Thank you everyone for listening and I wish you a pleasant evening. Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Bye-bye.