Jules Bourbon

Installation

HiJKMNOPQ ABCDEFG takes the form of an installation combining a video with the full range of materials from which it originates. Administrative documents, invoices, post-it notes, hand-written notes and found objects constitute the very material of the video while also remaining present in the installation in their material form, making visible the various elements that contributed to its construction.
Collected and then rearranged, these elements become the starting point for an exploration of the multiple forms language can take. The project is based on pre-existing forms of writing, administrative, accounting-related, everyday and personal, which I collect, displace and bring into dialogue with one another.
My work consists in removing them from their initial function in order to rearrange them and allow other possibilities of reading to emerge. Repetition, collage, montage and transformation become ways of making perceptible the diversity of language’s possible uses, from its most codified forms to its freest forms.

Over the course of the film, administrative texts and invoices gradually lose their informative function and become sonic material. Handwritten fragments, meanwhile, are brought together through juxtapositions and associations to form a new text. Finally, an alphabet made from collected objects enables the writing of new sentences, extending this shift of language towards other forms.

The installation thus brings the collected materials into relation with their transformations within the image. It traces a journey through different registers of language exploring how ordinary materials, once displaced and rearranged, can become the basis for new forms of writing, reading and interpretation.

Jules Bourbon

Découvrir le profil

Born in Paris in 1994, Jules Bourbon works at the crossroads of cinema and contemporary art, melding video, photography and writing. A graduate of Villa Arson and then the beaux-arts de Paris, he joined Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2024. Writing plays a central role in his approach. Taking inspiration from everyday life and the mundane, he focuses on filming and narrating what is repeated, what accumulates, and what, at first glance, seems insignificant. His work has been presented at various venues and events, notably the Fondation Pernod Ricard, Cinéma du réel at the Centre Pompidou, and the Salon de Montrouge. In 2022, he received the Thaddaeus Ropac Prize. The following year, he was selected for the Révélations Emerige (10th edition), with Galerie Nathalie Obadia as a partner for that edition, and received a Special Mention from the Villa Noailles jury.

Production

Credits