about PASSAGERS
written by Clara Darrason
1. PASSAGER, -ÈRE (a.)
1. Having the quality of merely passing by or through.
2. Of brief duration.
2. PASSAGER, -ÈRE (n.)
One who travels or is carried in some form of private or public conveyance, such as an automobile, train, bus, airplane or ship, without being its operator or a member of its crew.
Anne-Charlotte Finel is a wayfarer, an explorer constantly on the move, in search of tiers paysages (or “third landscapes”), to use the term coined by Gilles Clément1, spaces where man has handed over the evolution of landscape to nature alone. To hunt down the artist in her quest to capture images, you would need to head out in the mist, before daybreak or at dusk. As a video artist, Finel is always on the go, making her way across terrain. Following her footsteps could just as well take you aboard a transatlantic cargo ship or to the depths of a gypsum quarry, up against a castle in ruins or along a metro tunnel, onto an airport’s runways or near a military base, an oil refinery, a nuclear power plant, a dam or a farm. In PASSAGERS, she presents images of habitats that could not possibly exist in the vicinity of her Paris studio. These places seem made up, beyond reach or outside time. Finel never identifies them and the title of each work often provides the only clue. Her PASSAGERS are both fleeting instants and bodies in movement. Optical shifts emerge from this double meaning. Fiber, water and skin take center stage in this new series. A spider’s dragline stretches out to a considerable length, joining with the parallel idea of a filament wound into a cocoon. Water is a hiding place for predators. It is pearlescent, purple, peopled with unknowns. Light springs from it or is extinguished within it, swallowed up by the night. Surfaces are transformed into either fleshy coverings or landscapes. Skin serves as a vehicle, a container allowing for the passage from one state to another, a desired and coveted material.
The installation conceived as part of the LVMH Métiers d’Art residency consists of overlaid images printed on different kinds of silk—organza, satin, twill, translucent toile—and on frosted glass. The fabrics are displayed on five panels of a metal structure two meters high and in an irregular pentagon shape. Accentuating the effects of transparency and depth, videos are projected through some of the fabric panels. This three-dimensional frame serves
as a vessel on which Finel’s passengers are jumbled together. As visitors, our eye slowly adjusts to the overlapping of materials, trying to identify the object or subject of the artist’s explorations—where she finds herself and for what reason—to finally let go, allowing ourselves to be whisked away by the intertwining of hair, scales and membranes. The distended heads of a group of baby crocodiles suggest Antoine d’Agata’s hazy and contorted faces or Paul Caponigro’s ghostlike running deer. The soft focus, the indeterminateness of certain images calls to mind the writings of Baptiste Morizot, in particular his essay collection On the Animal Trail, where he concludes as follows after an encounter with a wolf : “Anatomy can only be studied in bright light. We need another language: we see ‘wolf-impressions,’ space-time complexes, unfinished silhouettes where the imagination supplements the gaps in our vision. It is so natural to see monsters—werewolves2.” From alligator impressions to landscape impressions, morphologies are surmised or fade away in a space without outlines, changeable and multifaceted. Worlds and textures are defined on the screen, only to disintegrate a moment later. In a photograph, a rough, undulating mass thrusts through shimmering water. Are we viewing exoplanets or the Pillars of Creation, sea lichens, an archipelago or an oil spill? It makes little difference that it is actually the part of a reptile’s head rising above the surface of the water. The choice of framing and the play of contrasts have deviated the processing of information, thus giving way to an abstraction that is far richer in possibilities.
Finel’s practice does not adopt a documentary style, whether in relation to format or scientific approach, but the nuances of scale she employs in the handling of images recall the surrealist-inflected films and photographs of the avant-garde scientist and nature documentarian Jean Painlevé. Over and above the technical prowess he demonstrated in his underwater explorations of the 1930s, Painlevé revealed the complex beauty of each organism by viewing them through a microscope. Similarly, the dreamlike and contemplative impact of Finel’s work is the result of the meticulous attention devoted to the treatment of surfaces, but also, and above all, the transfiguration of bodies into landscapes and vice versa. In one image, the mirrored surface of water is cleaved by the dorsal fin of a reptile, while in another a snow-capped mountain dotted with trees is transformed into the undulating muscles of a bull whose back is studded with flies. The artist’s only optical instrument is her documentary camera. She does not use special effects, tricks, alterations or stagings. She shoots by day or night using natural light, occasionally employing a hunting flashlight or backlighting.
The symbolic features of the insects or animals on which Finel focuses her attentions are ambiguous and murky. Her subjects of interests range from unloved species and pests to diurnal creatures like pythons (L'ŒIL DU PYTHON, 2020), water striders (GERRIDAE, 2020) and pigs (MOUCHES, 2021). One of her videos begins with a moving shot, on an olive-green background, filmed at dusk. The undulations of a few floating bodies gradually melt away in the marshy water. The image is both dense and heavy, gradually becoming saturated with the intersections of armor-clad tails, napes and snouts. Orange and blue spots light up like screens, flicker, and set off in pairs, this symmetry revealing the intentionality of perceptions. Finel used a flashlight to make the alligators’ eyes sparkle. The creatures are clearly feeding and the grouping of reptiles seems nightmarish for our species. In this quest for monsters, the artist stays safe, putting distance between herself and the animals with her camera. The camera’s alternation between close-ups and long shots leads us to question the identity of the observer. The viewpoint is by turns that of the artist, an individual reptile within the gathering of its fellows, or a space telescope. This passage from one vision to another, from gravitational anchoring to the weightlessness of bodies, to an entry into orbit, eventually lowers the status of the human element. Humans become merely a living thing like any other, a species among others on Earth. Finel underscores this upending of perception by way of the twinkling of dozens of points of light amid the darkness, a galactic cluster in a halo of dark matter. She thus simulates a vertiginous leap into infinite space by expanding the field of vision. The crocodile’s vertical pupil becomes a time portal reflecting a light source having left its point of origin millennia ago and that no longer exists.
1. Having the quality of merely passing by or through.
2. Of brief duration.
2. PASSAGER, -ÈRE (n.)
One who travels or is carried in some form of private or public conveyance, such as an automobile, train, bus, airplane or ship, without being its operator or a member of its crew.
Anne-Charlotte Finel is a wayfarer, an explorer constantly on the move, in search of tiers paysages (or “third landscapes”), to use the term coined by Gilles Clément1, spaces where man has handed over the evolution of landscape to nature alone. To hunt down the artist in her quest to capture images, you would need to head out in the mist, before daybreak or at dusk. As a video artist, Finel is always on the go, making her way across terrain. Following her footsteps could just as well take you aboard a transatlantic cargo ship or to the depths of a gypsum quarry, up against a castle in ruins or along a metro tunnel, onto an airport’s runways or near a military base, an oil refinery, a nuclear power plant, a dam or a farm. In PASSAGERS, she presents images of habitats that could not possibly exist in the vicinity of her Paris studio. These places seem made up, beyond reach or outside time. Finel never identifies them and the title of each work often provides the only clue. Her PASSAGERS are both fleeting instants and bodies in movement. Optical shifts emerge from this double meaning. Fiber, water and skin take center stage in this new series. A spider’s dragline stretches out to a considerable length, joining with the parallel idea of a filament wound into a cocoon. Water is a hiding place for predators. It is pearlescent, purple, peopled with unknowns. Light springs from it or is extinguished within it, swallowed up by the night. Surfaces are transformed into either fleshy coverings or landscapes. Skin serves as a vehicle, a container allowing for the passage from one state to another, a desired and coveted material.
The installation conceived as part of the LVMH Métiers d’Art residency consists of overlaid images printed on different kinds of silk—organza, satin, twill, translucent toile—and on frosted glass. The fabrics are displayed on five panels of a metal structure two meters high and in an irregular pentagon shape. Accentuating the effects of transparency and depth, videos are projected through some of the fabric panels. This three-dimensional frame serves
as a vessel on which Finel’s passengers are jumbled together. As visitors, our eye slowly adjusts to the overlapping of materials, trying to identify the object or subject of the artist’s explorations—where she finds herself and for what reason—to finally let go, allowing ourselves to be whisked away by the intertwining of hair, scales and membranes. The distended heads of a group of baby crocodiles suggest Antoine d’Agata’s hazy and contorted faces or Paul Caponigro’s ghostlike running deer. The soft focus, the indeterminateness of certain images calls to mind the writings of Baptiste Morizot, in particular his essay collection On the Animal Trail, where he concludes as follows after an encounter with a wolf : “Anatomy can only be studied in bright light. We need another language: we see ‘wolf-impressions,’ space-time complexes, unfinished silhouettes where the imagination supplements the gaps in our vision. It is so natural to see monsters—werewolves2.” From alligator impressions to landscape impressions, morphologies are surmised or fade away in a space without outlines, changeable and multifaceted. Worlds and textures are defined on the screen, only to disintegrate a moment later. In a photograph, a rough, undulating mass thrusts through shimmering water. Are we viewing exoplanets or the Pillars of Creation, sea lichens, an archipelago or an oil spill? It makes little difference that it is actually the part of a reptile’s head rising above the surface of the water. The choice of framing and the play of contrasts have deviated the processing of information, thus giving way to an abstraction that is far richer in possibilities.
Finel’s practice does not adopt a documentary style, whether in relation to format or scientific approach, but the nuances of scale she employs in the handling of images recall the surrealist-inflected films and photographs of the avant-garde scientist and nature documentarian Jean Painlevé. Over and above the technical prowess he demonstrated in his underwater explorations of the 1930s, Painlevé revealed the complex beauty of each organism by viewing them through a microscope. Similarly, the dreamlike and contemplative impact of Finel’s work is the result of the meticulous attention devoted to the treatment of surfaces, but also, and above all, the transfiguration of bodies into landscapes and vice versa. In one image, the mirrored surface of water is cleaved by the dorsal fin of a reptile, while in another a snow-capped mountain dotted with trees is transformed into the undulating muscles of a bull whose back is studded with flies. The artist’s only optical instrument is her documentary camera. She does not use special effects, tricks, alterations or stagings. She shoots by day or night using natural light, occasionally employing a hunting flashlight or backlighting.
The symbolic features of the insects or animals on which Finel focuses her attentions are ambiguous and murky. Her subjects of interests range from unloved species and pests to diurnal creatures like pythons (L'ŒIL DU PYTHON, 2020), water striders (GERRIDAE, 2020) and pigs (MOUCHES, 2021). One of her videos begins with a moving shot, on an olive-green background, filmed at dusk. The undulations of a few floating bodies gradually melt away in the marshy water. The image is both dense and heavy, gradually becoming saturated with the intersections of armor-clad tails, napes and snouts. Orange and blue spots light up like screens, flicker, and set off in pairs, this symmetry revealing the intentionality of perceptions. Finel used a flashlight to make the alligators’ eyes sparkle. The creatures are clearly feeding and the grouping of reptiles seems nightmarish for our species. In this quest for monsters, the artist stays safe, putting distance between herself and the animals with her camera. The camera’s alternation between close-ups and long shots leads us to question the identity of the observer. The viewpoint is by turns that of the artist, an individual reptile within the gathering of its fellows, or a space telescope. This passage from one vision to another, from gravitational anchoring to the weightlessness of bodies, to an entry into orbit, eventually lowers the status of the human element. Humans become merely a living thing like any other, a species among others on Earth. Finel underscores this upending of perception by way of the twinkling of dozens of points of light amid the darkness, a galactic cluster in a halo of dark matter. She thus simulates a vertiginous leap into infinite space by expanding the field of vision. The crocodile’s vertical pupil becomes a time portal reflecting a light source having left its point of origin millennia ago and that no longer exists.
The large, fluffy cocoons involved in silk production also evoke the cosmic universe, solar
eclipses and the ellipses traced by the orbit of Uranus. The white casings are backlit, their crackled surface crisscrossed with metallic threads, recalling Berenice Abbott’s photographs
of magnetic fields. Through these images, Finel draws parallels with drawing, taking the line as the point of departure, as a simple and primitive geometric shape. The silhouette of a chrysalis within a levitating cocoon and the variations in silk density therefore suggest the
scribble drawings of Sol LeWitt, dense networks of vein-like scrawls in graphite pencil. In a
second video, Finel juxtaposes portions of spiders’ webs. The geometric meshes overlap and their woven complexity is shot through with natural light. These diaphanous canopies are never revealed in their entirety. The enlarged view fills the entire screen in a kaleidoscope of patterns that calls to mind Robert Smithson’s Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969). The
sheets of silk create a cross-hatching of lines, fracturing the image and skewing the vision,
like the square mirrors installed by this pioneering land artist in the sprawling branches and under the arching and twisted roots of a mangrove. This climb-down of images allows for an optical shift: the landscape’s forms are shattered, the momentary blindness or overexposure allowing for the reconstruction of our inability to see, which Smithson believed to be the task of the artist3. By following the threads of the eight-legged weavers and silk workers,
Finel sets a trap for our gaze. She captures it within a network of cyberpunk blue and green
monochromatic light beams evoking the world of the Matrix films, set against the atmospheric and synthetic reverberations of the soundtrack by Voiski (Luc Kheradmand).
Moving here into a register akin to science fiction, Finel’s PASSAGERS cast off their slough—the mulberry silkworm molts five times before spinning its cocoon, while alligators shed their scales and form new, larger ones as they grow in age and size. This exploration of epidermal structures provokes a dual reaction of seduction and fear. Along with the tactile and visual attraction for these structures as beautifully complex adornments and coverings, the experience also gives rise to a certain repulsion for them as bizarre, soft, wrinkled and shrouded outgrowths. The golden and rare luminescence of scales from a yellow and white belly recalls the vertebrae of a human skeleton. The depigmentation of an albino crocodile transforms the sought-after reptile leather into muscle tissue. The uneasiness results from this resemblance, perhaps because the separation that has always allowed our species to dominate the others is suddenly less clear. These others come closer to us, taking on more familiar characteristics, and although they previously seemed to belong to another realm, they are now revealed as having always been our fellow passengers. It is this shared animal nature that Finel adopts as a common denominator. Empathy is inspired by the roughness of a skin, the elastic torsion of a tail, the ingenious strategies of a predator, the simple beauty of a spun filament that contains life.
In her treatment of images, Finel conjures the infinite and finitude using a variety of techniques: the pixelated quivering of an interstitial twilight is produced by maintaining a soft focus; through the reinterpretation of the webbed surface of the trays housing the
silkworms, a caterpillar becomes a beluga in an abstraction recalling Wolfgang Tillmans’ iconic Freischwimmer series. The third video of Passagers opens with a close-up of mounds and swells in blue, gray and purplish tones. One cannot be sure if they are topographic maps or aerial or underwater shots of volcanic activity, ice mountains on Pluto or lunar craters. These stratified terrestrial or living crusts expand and retract. The rhythmic movements of the material hint at either geological activity or a breathing animal. Sometimes muddy or viscous, the scales embody a hybrid existence, leaning toward the fantastic and peopled with creatures of the medieval bestiary such as the griffin, the dragon and the phoenix. The video thus echoes the photograph on glass of alligator eggs, lined up for inspection, with light emanating from one of them, as if on the verge of hatching. A video still presents a sculptural and chalky composite of a wing and tail, suggesting the spine of a resting monster. In a darkened setting, otherworldly scutella take on a sawtooth appearance. Reptilian armor is revealed as the age-old vestige of distant dinosaur ancestors, as well as a projection of futuristic and dystopian architectures, between virtual interfaces and 3D printing.
In PASSAGERS, life exists in all its forms: embryonic, in metamorphosis, in the fullness of being, and at the end of the cycle. Although bred and raised on an alligator farm, the creatures filmed by Finel are untamed agents of a visual and carnal world asserting its presence through the deployment of ancestral strategies for protection, survival and seduction. Their skins are springboards towards the infinite.
In the final moments of the video, muffled rumblings seem to be rising from deep within a glacier or a terrifying maw. A life force reverberating from the chasms of this carnivorous landscape. Should we venture further on this crest surmounted by ivory stalactites? The words of the writer Catherine Poulain might serve to point up this desire for hand-to-hand combat, for some sort of quixotic joining. One night in Alaska, on the deck of a trawler buffeted by a violent storm, she guts her first halibut: “I wash out the inside of the white body cavity. Its severed heart has spilled onto the table, still beating. I hesitate. I take this heart that can’t make up its mind to die and swallow it. Warm inside me, that solitary heart4.” Like a mournful howl to immortality from one animal to another.
1 Gilles Clément, Manifeste pour le Tiers Paysage (Paris: L’Autre Fable, 2004), p.5.
2 Baptiste Morizot, On the Animal Trail (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
3 Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969): p.28–34.
4 Catherine Poulain, Woman at Sea (New York: Random House, 2018), p.243.
Moving here into a register akin to science fiction, Finel’s PASSAGERS cast off their slough—the mulberry silkworm molts five times before spinning its cocoon, while alligators shed their scales and form new, larger ones as they grow in age and size. This exploration of epidermal structures provokes a dual reaction of seduction and fear. Along with the tactile and visual attraction for these structures as beautifully complex adornments and coverings, the experience also gives rise to a certain repulsion for them as bizarre, soft, wrinkled and shrouded outgrowths. The golden and rare luminescence of scales from a yellow and white belly recalls the vertebrae of a human skeleton. The depigmentation of an albino crocodile transforms the sought-after reptile leather into muscle tissue. The uneasiness results from this resemblance, perhaps because the separation that has always allowed our species to dominate the others is suddenly less clear. These others come closer to us, taking on more familiar characteristics, and although they previously seemed to belong to another realm, they are now revealed as having always been our fellow passengers. It is this shared animal nature that Finel adopts as a common denominator. Empathy is inspired by the roughness of a skin, the elastic torsion of a tail, the ingenious strategies of a predator, the simple beauty of a spun filament that contains life.
In her treatment of images, Finel conjures the infinite and finitude using a variety of techniques: the pixelated quivering of an interstitial twilight is produced by maintaining a soft focus; through the reinterpretation of the webbed surface of the trays housing the
silkworms, a caterpillar becomes a beluga in an abstraction recalling Wolfgang Tillmans’ iconic Freischwimmer series. The third video of Passagers opens with a close-up of mounds and swells in blue, gray and purplish tones. One cannot be sure if they are topographic maps or aerial or underwater shots of volcanic activity, ice mountains on Pluto or lunar craters. These stratified terrestrial or living crusts expand and retract. The rhythmic movements of the material hint at either geological activity or a breathing animal. Sometimes muddy or viscous, the scales embody a hybrid existence, leaning toward the fantastic and peopled with creatures of the medieval bestiary such as the griffin, the dragon and the phoenix. The video thus echoes the photograph on glass of alligator eggs, lined up for inspection, with light emanating from one of them, as if on the verge of hatching. A video still presents a sculptural and chalky composite of a wing and tail, suggesting the spine of a resting monster. In a darkened setting, otherworldly scutella take on a sawtooth appearance. Reptilian armor is revealed as the age-old vestige of distant dinosaur ancestors, as well as a projection of futuristic and dystopian architectures, between virtual interfaces and 3D printing.
In PASSAGERS, life exists in all its forms: embryonic, in metamorphosis, in the fullness of being, and at the end of the cycle. Although bred and raised on an alligator farm, the creatures filmed by Finel are untamed agents of a visual and carnal world asserting its presence through the deployment of ancestral strategies for protection, survival and seduction. Their skins are springboards towards the infinite.
In the final moments of the video, muffled rumblings seem to be rising from deep within a glacier or a terrifying maw. A life force reverberating from the chasms of this carnivorous landscape. Should we venture further on this crest surmounted by ivory stalactites? The words of the writer Catherine Poulain might serve to point up this desire for hand-to-hand combat, for some sort of quixotic joining. One night in Alaska, on the deck of a trawler buffeted by a violent storm, she guts her first halibut: “I wash out the inside of the white body cavity. Its severed heart has spilled onto the table, still beating. I hesitate. I take this heart that can’t make up its mind to die and swallow it. Warm inside me, that solitary heart4.” Like a mournful howl to immortality from one animal to another.
1 Gilles Clément, Manifeste pour le Tiers Paysage (Paris: L’Autre Fable, 2004), p.5.
2 Baptiste Morizot, On the Animal Trail (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
3 Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969): p.28–34.
4 Catherine Poulain, Woman at Sea (New York: Random House, 2018), p.243.