Gilles Ribero

Film

Falling bodies. A telephone in the sand. A man running, who falls on it and disappears. An ode to inertia. A search for a simple line, a thread held taut between two worlds.

The film starts with a mobile phone found on the shore and the video it turns out to contain. It arises from the desire to go beyond the scene of a fall, to see it come alive in another context (that of its discovery), with another vocabulary, and to deflect its innate grotesqueness onto another terrain, one with romantic connotations. This is about a screen, the little screen of so-called smartphones, which are reconfiguring our relation to the world. The one whereby attention and bodies are absorbed, disinvesting the here and now, feeling the headiness of a change of being through integration of a greater body, at the same time as they are resisting it by struggling, in a protective reflex.

This is about hybridity. The film takes from cinema its specific language of shots, editing, rhythms and breaks, and its medium (35mm), while experimenting with video (extended duration, work on matter and texture, bleeding colours, changes of framing).

The image emerges from this permeability of supports, with the changes of perception that accompany it, while developing the initial legacy: this slippery fall where the inertia of the body makes movement inexorable.

Gilles Ribero

Before joining Le Fresnoy in 2014, Gilles Ribero was formed at ESA Le Septante Cinq, in Brussels. The body is his main field of experimentation. It acts as a lens through which the eye is formed. He uses mainly photography and video to reveal these shifting states that occur in it, on perceptual and formal levels.
He lives and works in Brussels, and is part of the collective La Grotte.