SEL

Faithful to the author’s filmic practice, which painstakingly explores primal gestures, Sel expresses the artist’s ambition to actualize a form of creative sharing and exchange of expertise. The film was made in collaboration with the group “Elevator Production”, formed by five of the artists who, together with Digne, participated in the program VISIO 2015. The theoretical sources of inspiration for this video are Bataille’s concept of dépense (spending), and Marcel Mauss’ essay on the gift. Shot on the beach of Le Havre in a single day, coinciding with the dawn and the rising of the tide, the film is the result of a performance in which the actors bring blocks of salt, commonly used in agriculture to prevent sodium deficiency in ruminants, to the shoreline. The tide rises and incorporates the salt that belongs to the sea itself. The performative action is filmed simultaneously by two fixed cameras: a Super 8, the medium often used by the artist to document what is happening, and a high-definition digital camera, that records the entire action, showing the different perspectives from which it’s formed.