Instants Nature morte
Philippine Schaefer is an incredible artist who handles with the same ease the sculpture, the photography, the performance, the tattoo…
She allowed me to enter with my camera into her creative process and I made the serie “Nature morte”. I love her work. It represents, to me, the fragility of humans being. Strongness and fragility of live.
INFOS
One day Philippine Schaefer asked me to help her during to take a photo « because her hands were going to be wet » . I found myself in her bathroom, with the artist immersed in her black bathtub filled with seaweeds. I was just there to push the boton of her camera, but I just wanted to film her ! I took out my old iPhone of my pocket and I began to film her.
I wanted to testify of such moment (Instant) of creation which I had the opportunity to attend.
I made my first Instant with Philippine Schaefer : Seaweeds. The first one of the series which I called Nature Morte.
BIO Philippine Schäfer:
Born in 1970 in Germany Westphalia, lives and works in Paris today. Awarded a diploma by the ENSBA of Paris in 1997. Multimedia secrtion, Christian Boltanski workshop. She worked the sculpture, the performance and the photography with Georges Jeanclos, Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum and Graciela Iturbide. In 1998 she discovers the tattoo which she practises since in a resolutely singular approach. Photography becomes the privileged tool of its physical explorations.
“Non point des auto-portraits mais des hétéro-portraits de fragrance cosmique, dans le chassé-croisé des règnes le corps rendu à son animalité visité par la structure végétale le minéral déporté vers la conscience de son être de silence. …”
Philippine Schäfer, De l’autre côté du temps par Véronique Bergen, 2012
Instants Souffle d’argile
Philippine Schaefer and the clay
INFOS
Philippine Schaefer and the clay : 3 Instants on subjects which affect me particularly as woman: maternity, breast cancer and feeling rooted. Here the clay has the leading role. The clay as the reminder of the Earth Mother, of the Genesis, of the first artistic creations since the ancient times.
I enter with my camera as closely as possible to the the artist creative process before she obtains her cliché.
The clay and the body dance here between fascination and obsession, at the rythme of an almost childish freedom. The camera is as an extension of my body which enter the frame as the symbiosis between the artist and myself . Thanks to this closeness I can go to the closest to the creation and the intentions of the artist.
Récits de peau_Skin stories
Philippine Schaefer and the tattoo art.
INFOS
Philippine Schaefer and the art of the tattoo. Real hand made costumes, watercolors on skin … Philippine Schaefer’s tattoos adapt perfectly to the bodies as prehistoric paintings adapted themselves to caves walls.
Déchirés_Ripped out
The film Ripped out (Déchirés) is an artistic act realized after the terrorist act perpetrated in Paris at Bataclan on November 13, 2015.
Ba-ta-clan Project
INFOS
Ripped out is a moment of meditation : 4 minutes and 35 seconds of deep-thinking.
In Ripped out the artist Philippine Schaefer makes a piece for the exhibition
BA-TA-CLAN Project, an artistic initiative born of the aftermath of the attacks.
The need for action was then, for all of us, as the instinct of survival.
Philippine Schaefer chose to tear a poster as the bodies were also ripped out.
I film the artist in her gesture by imagining a body being teared in a fraction of a second.
This action was also a way of evacuating our pain, anger and helplessness in the face of the question everyone was asking the day after the massacre: What to do?
We were all torn apart. We were all Ripped out.
Finally, artist and filmaker, we did what we know : create. Create as a reaction.
Ripped out is a witness for the moment we lived.
We wont forget. We dont want to forget. We must not forget.
Art denounces, art educates, art revolts, art touches us … art also cures.
Sandra WIS
© Sandra WIS