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Cinema Elvire Popesco -
Tuesday, March 27, 2018 - 18:00
Cinema Muzeul Țăranului -
Thursday, March 29, 2018 - 21:00
Written by:
Ali Cherri
Cinematography:
Alexandre Berger
Editing:
Suzana Pedro
Sound:
Mikaël Barre
Production:
Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques et CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. With the support of: Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Musée du Louvre etc.
Romanian Premiere
Under the sleepwalking trance of cinema, the violence of spectatorship goes on while the filmmaker sleeps quietly and unperturbed in his bed. Light slumber pushes forward and we’re transported in the otherworldly rooms of natural history museums. The only visitor haunting its empty halls is Ali Cherri, walking past the museum’s glass cases of taxidermy and ancient iconography of gods and men. Millennia of human civilization and its relationship to the natural and artistic world are grouped together under one roof. An informative but nonetheless ironic diagram looms large in the background: classification of the living. In a gesture of solidarity, protest or deific servitude, the mummification process absorbs our protagonist – but the eyes remain open, taking in the exaltation of existence in the company of our ancestors. (Andrei Tănăsescu, BIEFF 2018)
Director:
Contact:
ali.cherri[at]gmail[dot]com
Festivals, awards:
- Jeu de Paume, Paris 2017
- CAPC Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux 2017
Curatorial comment:
Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Ali Cherri’s Somniculus (the Latin word for light sleep) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artefacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest. Preserved inside this structure of historiographic display, each object is representative of a place or a time and each artefact lives on as a container of its own history. What if we suspended these objects outside this constructed framework of controlled meaning? Would their ideological value become any less tangible? […] Shining a light on these spaces of perpetual significance within Western culture, Somniculus brings a heightened awareness to the act of looking and seeing in the museum. As an anonymous man sleeps in an otherwise empty gallery we realise that he too is representative of a culture, a time, a place. These fragments of loss, destruction and violence stand in as representations of civilizations’ past. In accordance with the cultures they serve to represent, these objects are neither caught inside the deep dark past nor immediately visible in the light of our present day, but forever waiting to be awakened. (Osei Bonsu)
Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Ali Cherri’s Somniculus (the Latin word for light sleep) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artefacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest. Preserved inside this structure of historiographic display, each object is representative of a place or a time and each artefact lives on as a container of its own history. What if we suspended these objects outside this constructed framework of controlled meaning? Would their ideological value become any less tangible? […] Shining a light on these spaces of perpetual significance within Western culture, Somniculus brings a heightened awareness to the act of looking and seeing in the museum. As an anonymous man sleeps in an otherwise empty gallery we realise that he too is representative of a culture, a time, a place. These fragments of loss, destruction and violence stand in as representations of civilizations’ past. In accordance with the cultures they serve to represent, these objects are neither caught inside the deep dark past nor immediately visible in the light of our present day, but forever waiting to be awakened. (Osei Bonsu)