Vivere Memento

Unable to dance, I made my plants dance.

Watching the movements of nature has always inspired contemporary dancers and choreographers, from Xavier Le Roy’s lions to the performative gardening of Steve Paxton or Hijikata. For me, these gestures of the living became choreographic forms in their own right.

During the 2020 lockdowns, shut in my room, I began to observe the silent movement of my houseplants. Like me, they migrate and put down roots far from their native soil. Out of this attention came a series of videos in which I wanted to rethink the still life and the memento mori, those old pictorial forms that remind us of the fragility of existence. Here, time and the plants animate the composition: living natures that turn the classical vanitas around to affirm a memento vivere, remember that you are alive.

Dried flowers, plants from South America and Asia, woven clocks whose time runs backwards, fruit and light compose abstract pictures about the persistence of the living. Each video was filmed over roughly twenty-four hours: twenty-four hours of movement at the heart of an imposed stillness, twenty-four hours of taking root and awakening.

Winner of the Prix GIDE 2021, the project was shown for three months on two-metre-high LED screens in the GIDE offices in Paris.