Marine Hugonnier

NoguerasBlanchard is pleased to announce a new exhibition by Marine Hugonnier. The exhibition is Marine Hugonnier’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery and gives continuity to her research on topics such as image making or authorship. The title LE CINEMA A L’ESTOMAC reflects on the physical necessity of Cinema as a “facón d’être au monde” and as a tool of social criticism.

The Cinetracts presented in the show are political pamphlets/leaflet in cinematographic form. The first Cinetracts made by Marine Hugonnier were initially conceived for a commission from Random Act, a TV program on UK Channel 4 in 2012. They were made to be inserted into the flux of public programs, to operate in and between them. Over time, the project grew to become a diary, the artist’s scrapbook. It is therefor a work in progress.

The Cinetracts presented in the exhibition are a collection of sequences gathered from archives, TV or from the internet. Some have been modified, others haven’t. Some were made in response to the actual political events while others are templates for future films. Most sequences were the occasion for an experiment with sound, editing points to explore new cinematographic strategies.

Their title is a reference to the Cinetracts made during the May ‘68 revolution in France. At that time, politicians tried to exploit the workers and the student’s revolt and in response Chris Marker offered them his film production tools. The short anonymous films produced then were compiled to form the Cinetracts. Their aim was to take direct revolutionary actions and to serve as agit-prop during the uprisings.

The ones presented in this exhibition articulate the nuances of relations embedded in the aesthetic regimes and economies of news imagery, politics and entertainment. They convey ideas such as collaboration as a tool of social dissidence, Feminism as a won battle, pornography as a regime of images, news footage as fictional material, and they promote nonsense as a direct response to political events. As a result, they define Cinema as an effective political device. They seek to establish a critical sense, a “politic of vision” of the flux of images we are surrounded by and have the secret project to find sacredness in the profane.

Hugonnier’s approach to image-making is linked to the Godardian idea that cinema’s original sin was tourism. Both elements, by their very nature, deport us to places where we are strangers as well as being historically linked to the same process of transforming the world into a collection of points of view, into merchandise and a spectacle. This concept, which Hugonnier underscores throughout her practice, attempts to subvert images conceived as merchandise and seeks to formalise an experience of images through the world as opposed to the world through images.