Laurence Favre

Abstract

Expanded Spectropoetics, decolonizing strategies with the medium of film

In my current artistic research project Expanded Spectropoetics, decolonizing strategies with the medium of film, I interrogate the haunted aspects of colonial and environmental entanglements with the means of moving images, involving living and dead memories. I intend to explore how filmic language, as a tool that generates and enables vision and representation, can engage with decolonial ecology searching to generate a visual vocabulary, enabling a language that challenges normative ways of seeing.

I experiment possible ways of revealing invisible human and non-human presences, while blurring temporalities through diverse image-making techniques. I refer to “image-making“ as practices that create images in the viewer’s mind. This mostly implies still and moving images, sounds and writings. The development of a spectropoetical imagery based on analog and digital expanded film aims to produce a de-centering experience for the viewer.

Butterflies, dead and alive, will be at the heart of the research project.

Film still from Zerzura, Laurence Favre (2023). The film is the third part of a trilogy exploring natural environments and questioning anthropocentrism in a sensorial perspective. The first and second part of the trilogy Corpus animale are Resistance (2017, exploring the glacier) and Osmose (2022, diving in the woods)
Film still from Letters to Doctor L, Laurence Favre (2019). In this installation five inhabitants of the former swiss mission’s region in South Africa address a Letter to a XIXth century’s missionary in the form of audio time capsules sent to the past, establishing an speculative dialogue with the preacher’s diary/memories.
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Bio

Laurence Favre works with still  and moving images, primarly analog. In  her work she explores how to divert constructed binary oppositions between visible and invisible, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, memory and oblivion, the real and the fictional, generating poetic spaces where movement can be triggered. In the last several years she has been focusing on colonial and environmental matters.

Her films and installations have been shown at Locarno film festival, Rotterdam IFFR, Hong Kong HKIFF, Guanajuato GIFF among others, as well as in art spaces and informal spaces. She holds a Master of arts in Film, major in Direction (HES-SO ECAL/HEAD), and a Master of Advanced Studies in sociology (UniGe).

Laurence lives and works in Berlin and Geneva, she is an active member of the artist-run filmlab LaborBerlin and part of SPECTRAL’s  coordination team, a collaborative project on Expanded Cinematic Arts led by 6 european filmlabs.

Selection of recent projects/exhibitions/publications/fellowships:

  • 2023 La Contrainte du  Hasard / Die Bedingung des Zufalls, (publication, avec Mirjam Landolt)
  • 2022 Le géant de glace, le film et nous - Résistance et autres tentatives d’anthropodécentrisme par l’image et le son, Conférence “l’Art et les formes de la nature”, Montpellier/Paris 
  • 2022 6 Months artist residency + grant in Berlin, Canton de Genève
  • 2021 Talents contemporains – les finalistes, 10ème édition, Publication  Fondation  François Schneider
  • 2020 Landis + Gyr Werkstipendium
  • 2019 Letters to Doctor L, 6 channel video installation @ Espace Arlaud, Lausanne
  • 2017 Resistance, world premiere @ Locarno Film Festival
Portrait Laurence Favre ©Greg Clément
Lettres au Docteur L, installation 6 canals, Espace Arlaud, 2019