Armelle Aulestia — À propos — Slash Paris

A night-time journey on a highway reminiscent of a psychedelic hallucination (Circle Dream) ; a carousel hanging in a Sleeping Beauty ambiance (Baby Skooter) ; a construction site where a disturbing character works himself to death in a Dante-inspired din (Cleaning the First Circle of Hell) : here are a few of the moments offered to us in Armelle Aulestia’s videos, samples taken from the world as it is and then worked to give them that fragile autonomy, ambiguity, inherent in every fragment, in every detached piece. Each video work is a wager, an attempt at a specific form that is deduced without presuppositions from the recording of a situation whose immanent logic the artist both elaborates and discovers. Hence a kind of “fiction effect” due to the editing (sometimes extremely slight, but always effective), the handling of colour and the musical nature of the soundtrack. But there is no explanatory narrative element. This is definitely not a matter of telling stories, or of providing information on any given subject. The reserved, withdrawing nature of Aulestia’s work connects it with a tendency that one could describe as minimalist, in the most open sense of that word. It is far from any literary or documentary aim, just as it is from the narcissistic exploration. The work is a specific object whose object is perception but without excluding delectation