Jean-Baptiste Decavèle
Encyclopedia
Jean-Baptiste Decavele is a French video artist.
in 1961, Decavele works with representations of memory and effacement through video and photography.
Since 1999 he has held solo exhibitions in Paris, Ivry sur Seine, Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver and has participated in video festivals and presentations in Rome and France. He received the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs award in 1999 for his video Nostalgie, la Demeurance et l'Icone and again in 2001 for Entre Ciel et Mer, Voyage Aide Memoire.
If Jean-Baptiste Decavèle’s films depart from his travels— to the Arctic, South Africa, Turkey, or closer to home, in Paris—he does not seek to create a faithful image or to construct a documentary out of a place visited or a time spent elsewhere. He uses the video-camera, the screen, and the editing apparatus against the grain of wider trends in order to probe the relationship between the real and its image. The filmic or touristic gaze, too often associated with a colonizing attitude, is profoundly called into question, and these tools, frequently employed as instruments of conquest, are diverted from that function. Video becomes the potential matrix for an ars memorativa, enabling him to articulate the complex and interwoven relationship between time, site, and memory as a subjective and incarnated one.
Displacement and distancing are at the heart of his formal approach in Halman’s Walk (2003), L’Inaccoutumance (2006), Passions (2007) and Les choses du jour (2007), presented at the Jeu de Paume. Decavèle counterbalances the flatness of screens (video-camera, computer, movie) by reworking images in their thickness. Sequences are rapid, move in fits and starts, or slowed to the point of their suspension. He employs texts and sounds that do not always correspond to the images we see, but which suggest, through the use of the same voice (actor Michael Lonsdale
) and the same face (actress Elina Löwensohn
) across several films, the existence of fictional characters and of a threadbare narrative. His films, with their simultaneously identifiable and unrecognizable images, trace both a physical cartography and an interior landscape that shifts in its own time and in which emotions, eroticism, and visual pleasure take place.
Biography
Born in GrenobleGrenoble
Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...
in 1961, Decavele works with representations of memory and effacement through video and photography.
Since 1999 he has held solo exhibitions in Paris, Ivry sur Seine, Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver and has participated in video festivals and presentations in Rome and France. He received the Villa Medicis Hors les Murs award in 1999 for his video Nostalgie, la Demeurance et l'Icone and again in 2001 for Entre Ciel et Mer, Voyage Aide Memoire.
If Jean-Baptiste Decavèle’s films depart from his travels— to the Arctic, South Africa, Turkey, or closer to home, in Paris—he does not seek to create a faithful image or to construct a documentary out of a place visited or a time spent elsewhere. He uses the video-camera, the screen, and the editing apparatus against the grain of wider trends in order to probe the relationship between the real and its image. The filmic or touristic gaze, too often associated with a colonizing attitude, is profoundly called into question, and these tools, frequently employed as instruments of conquest, are diverted from that function. Video becomes the potential matrix for an ars memorativa, enabling him to articulate the complex and interwoven relationship between time, site, and memory as a subjective and incarnated one.
Displacement and distancing are at the heart of his formal approach in Halman’s Walk (2003), L’Inaccoutumance (2006), Passions (2007) and Les choses du jour (2007), presented at the Jeu de Paume. Decavèle counterbalances the flatness of screens (video-camera, computer, movie) by reworking images in their thickness. Sequences are rapid, move in fits and starts, or slowed to the point of their suspension. He employs texts and sounds that do not always correspond to the images we see, but which suggest, through the use of the same voice (actor Michael Lonsdale
Michael Lonsdale
Michael Lonsdale , sometimes billed as Michel Lonsdale, is a French actor who has appeared in over 180 films and television shows....
) and the same face (actress Elina Löwensohn
Elina Löwensohn
Elina Löwensohn is a Romanian-born American actress.-Biography:Löwensohn was born in Bucharest, Romania. After the death of her father, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, her mother emigrated to the United States with her, where her mother went on a hunger strike in order to get a visa for...
) across several films, the existence of fictional characters and of a threadbare narrative. His films, with their simultaneously identifiable and unrecognizable images, trace both a physical cartography and an interior landscape that shifts in its own time and in which emotions, eroticism, and visual pleasure take place.