Quentin Douchez-Wanscoor

Film

In a setting that is part theatre stage, part television studio, three characters are searching for treasure on an imaginary island. Under the eye of the cameras, they play and make love. But within this illusion, the song of the omniscient and invisible narrator that is the Sun worms its way into their minds, stoking hatred and transforming the quest into collective paranoia.
Inspired by Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Bosquet de Wagner’s bloody sojourn in the Galapagos Islands and the theories of Alexander Chizhevsky concerning the link between solar cycles and human politics, Spectres on the Beach is a speculative fable about the feeling of powerlessness in the face of ecological crises. But this is no standard apocalyptical film: climate change is depicted here as the rise of imaginary waves, set to the rhythm of the songs of a Sun with an auto-tuned human voice. Somewhere between a child’s ravings, a grotesque game and fatal tragedy, the film satirises our fears of disaster by transforming them into an absurd quest in which humanity loses its footing within its own system.
Using models and deliberately naive, the film reveals its artifices in order to break down the walls of fiction. This transparency becomes a critical space for an economy of extraction, since, in hunting for the treasure, the characters paradoxically end up digging their own graves.

Quentin Douchez-Wanscoor

Découvrir le profil

Born in Lille in 1996, Quentin Douchez-Wanscoor lives and works in Roubaix. His work spans video and installation, as well as sculpture, performance, music and writing. He crafts narratives in which philosophy, myths, fantasy, pop culture and post-internet culture intersect, set out in theatrical installations made of plaster, ropes and fabrics, but also digital images and electronic music. Behind a childlike, colourful world, he explores darker themes such as the fear of death, loneliness and depression, which he contrasts with reflections on metamorphosis, care, melancholy and curiosity about the world. He is a graduate of the universities of Lille and Nantes and the École des Beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire, where he obtained his DNSEP (national arts degree) in 2023. He has done projects in France, Senegal and Bolivia. His work has been shown at Super Galerie, galerie RDV and the TU in Nantes, Espacio CACA in Santa Cruz de la Sierra and the Institut pour la photographie in Lille. In 2026 he was awarded the City of Nantes’ Special Jury Prize for Visual Arts.

Production

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