Jules Ramage
The Bird - Film - 11min - 2023
présenté dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 25
Film
During her incarceration, Gauche develops a survival strategy based on verbal witness: she describes her everyday life in pages that she performs in a slam in the prison yard. On these occasions, she also invites her fellow inmates to sit in a circle and share their stories, which she writes in her notebook. There she also puts down her own texts, titled by date, but also the calendar that allows her to keep track of the days and to measure the impact of the prison experience on her menstrual cycle. Six months later, she performs these documents on the film set, in an individual and collective and deeply political act of witness.
A dedicated program, written in the MAX/MSP environment, allows a range of plastic processes specific to the post-traumatic experience to be simulated within the editing itself, through more or less subtle, more or less minute disturbances. These underline the violence that Gauche still remembers, but also her resilience -- the courage to stand tall on the shoot and perform in front of the camera.
Jules Ramage
Jules Ramage (1987, France) is a visual artist and researcher. Associated with the CERILAC laboratory at the University of Paris, he is also a member of the Cité du Genre, interdisciplinary research institute in gender studies. He explores the complex relationships of power at play in disciplinary and institutional structures.
Since 2013, he has conducted in-depth fieldwork in the prison space, where he implements collaborative protocols with inmates as well as prison guards. His approach to creation focuses on the co-construction of knowledge and practices and our capacity to inhabit spaces. Aware of the ethical and legal limits specific to his field and the status of his collaborators, he works in the logic of expanded cinema, by producing films but also, when this is impossible, by activating his content through installations, photography, editorial objects, and performance.
His work has been exhibited in France, the United States, Argentina, England, Spain, and Germany.
