Aujourd'hui, on est là
(excerpt)
In 2017 video artist Erika Roux encountered the then nascent La Révolution est en marche (LREEM), a grassroots organization working toward social justice in Aulnay sous Bois, the Parisian banlieue where she grew up. What began as a request to observe and film them during private gatherings and public actions grew into an intimate bond. The past year she has accompanied the collective to rallies, protests, meetings, and assemblies as they sought to expand what was initiated as a Facebook page into a widespread social movement.LREEM’s members frequently use cellphone cameras to broadcast political objectives, record tense and impassioned street actions, or document the living conditions they seek to change. Roux’s own filmmaking captures many of these self-presentations, as well as generally off-camera, quieter moments of reflection among members in each other’s homes. Her latest video work 'Aujourd'hui, on est là' captures LREEM’s attempts to create a new political imaginary by bringing together underprivileged and under-represented communities nationwide. It documents various collective struggles, including the endeavor to gather signatures from 500 mayors across the country in order to make cofounder Hadama Traoré an eligible candidate in the 2022 presidential elections.Together with fellow Jan van Eyck participant Rudy Guedj, Roux takes screenshots from LREEM’s online videos and blows them up to poster size. The posters allow the collective’s digital presence to intervene in public space. An archive of the screenshots will also be presented in a book alongside collected testimonies, essays, and documents. Co-published by Building Fictions (Guedj’s publishing imprint) and NoGoZone (LREEM’s), the book will straddle the realms of art publishing, political archiving, and social engagement, while also reflecting on Roux’s multiple entanglements within the movement.
Difficult
(excerpt)
Difficult focuses on an all female music band named DIFFICULT. This video uses a documentary approach relating the musical practice of the band within the safe space of the rehearsal studio.
The band is composed of untrained musicians; they embrace on stage and in their composition their amateurism by making the cracks, hesitations and mistakes visible to the audience which destabilizes a traditional understanding of music making and virtuosity. This video looks at how nuanced and unassertive modes of being can carry a powerful and subversive potential; in DIFFICULT's case I perceive it as an empowering feminist gesture.
The footages are mainly composed of the bands developing process of composing songs. The songs are composed through improvisation and jamming, the lyrics are glimpses of their personal communal experiences. Focusing on their musical process unfolding in front of the camera, the viewer is invited to look at a vulnerable but generative situation. Non-verbal communication, musical elements, empathy and affect are intertwined, revealing many complexities that the resulting music track won’t ever expose.
Petals in the Ring
Thinking of the boundaries that have separated humans and vegetal world, this video is a speculative attempt to make a connection. Through a lyrical consideration the video reflects on plant intelligence, the intersections of erotic and botany and the communal strive between species in living and reproducing.
In this fictive bond between species it is unclear who is addressing who, and who is experiencing what, who is being touched and who is touching.
Vanitas
Vanitas portrays four, unemployed characters in the future: a singer, a what-naut, a gamer and an office building. Revolving around the characters’ observations, it wonders about the transient and often meaningless seeming nature of human activity.
The video was shot in an empty office building situated in the center of Rotterdam. It borrows from the genre of science fiction its aesthetic and narrative methods as tools to discuss on the relation of human lives to new technology and disappearance or redefinition of work, as well as timeless matters such as loneliness, alienation and mortality.
The dialogue is inspired by the real life of the video makers and actors, transferred into a fictive and speculative reality. Built on a loose script containing speech, singing and movement, the actors are asked to improvise based on given characters
The world has shrank
The World Has Shrank is a play set in the apartment where I lived. Non-professional actors become characters trapped in a shrinking apartment. The enacted text borrows linguistic and narrative tropes of tragic drama, clichés and platitudes used in an absurd manner. The scene evoke with minimal means an apocalyptic and unsolvable situation in which the characters seem to be stuck together.
Set in a social house in Rotterdam, a city undergoing huge level of gentrification, in a time of climate collapse and neoliberal individualism, the video echoes a multifaceted feeling of anxiety. However, this feeling can be nuanced by the collaborative aspect of the work made visible by the intimacy of the setting and the playful participation of my artists friends.
A Couple Things, installation view
Crooked Elbow Serpent Brain, at Showroom Mama, Rotterdam 2017
A Couple Things
On a double screen installation, two larger than life teenagers embody by means of improvisation a couple in crises in the décor of a middle class British living room. The camera functions here as a tool that summons the two actors to perform a reality that they haven’t experienced yet. The improvised dialogue highlights their constructed visions of what romantic relationship between adults might be.
Paladins
The word “paladins” has multiple meanings; it can refer to a warrior, a trusted knight, or a leader of a cause, in French it could also mean a wandering knights.
The work presented is a three channel video installation constructed as three short looping scenes working separately but still in conversation with each other.
Although the all female characters being depicted in these scenes embody roles conceived as strong position in traditional cinematic narratives (an office manager, adventurous travellers and a musician), the protagonists are trapped in an endless loop of ineffective actions, cinematic clichés and unresolved plot. The inextricability of the situations suggests a sense of determinism in cinematic narrative methods and the hierarchies at play in the distribution of roles within gender.
Balkon van Europa
The video is entirely shot in the bar. The camera is moving across surfaces– showing bar’s interiors, clientele, and looking out of the windows into the open sea. A female protagonist inhabits the space. The images of boats passing by, customers coming in and out, multiple clocks, optical instruments and maritime souvenirs, slowly turning turbine wind mills are bouncing back and forth between reflective surfaces. The act of looking out simultaneously becomes the act of looking inside.
At the window, on the bed, behind the door
While filming my bedroom with my camera, I am gradually improvising stories that the space could contain. I am here playing with the idea of creating intuitive scripts by considering an intimate space as a place for experimenting with fiction.
Roommates
The work Roomates is a video installation composed of 5 looping videos. The main video is placed in the centre, showing a conversation between two roommates, Alice and Vikki. They are lying on a bed, talking about daily life banalities. This video is surrounded by 4 vignettes that are continuously looping, displaying Vikki enacting daily routines.
Yo Lo Conozco
Wandering around in the streets of Belalcázar, a small town in Spain, Erika Roux took pictures of strangers encountered on the road. Asking the inhabitants to react on these pictures in front of the camera, she is collecting stories and expressions, depicting the way people relate to each other in a small village and how they share this with a stranger.
Celui qui
I filmed my friends having a casual lunch together. Without being aware of it they embody characters from a novel I have read from Françoise Sagan, named Dans un mois, dans un an. The melancholy from the characters of Françoise Sagan interferes with the atmosphere of the situation and the perception of the persons being filmed, changing the moment into a fictional story.
Playing the Father, the Son
I asked my father to re-enact with me the theatre play of Marcel Pagnol called Marius. In the story of Pagnol, Marius is the son of Cesar, I play Marius, and my father plays Cesar. By trying to embody these fictional characters, the enactment insinuates parallels between the fictional story and the relation I have with my father.
Diesmal kannst du mich erkennen
My family is bilingual: we speak both French and German. By filming the moments before, during and after a diner I wanted to observe the different interactions between people. Families are specific in their formal aspect of relationship, where everyone is supposed to have his own position. By re-enacting all the voices from the different family members I found a way to appropriate all the different identities.
Psyche and Cupid
These two hands are from Cupid and Psyche, detail of a marble sculpture from Antonio Canova I saw for the first time in the Hermitage museum. My father and his girlfriend seemed the perfect couple to re-enact the image of Psyche offering her soul to love. The aim of the artist, the understanding of its model and the final result of the work never succeeded to join into a satisfying outcome. In this video, I wanted to show the constant frustration in the attempt of representation.