One Must Imagine Sysiphus Happy Art Video Installation
Role: Art, Conception, Animation, Editing, Graphic Design
Short art film on the theme of cycling, tour de France, and love long distance.
Art Video, Art film, Video installation for shown at the Launch Party of the first Issue of Chalet Magazine at the Rox Gallery in the Lower East Side, New York. This is a project I made during an artist in residency program from a swiss grant. The idea of this film came from the meeting the founder and creative director of the Magazine David Trumpf.
The magazine explores cities from the perspective of the bike to understand a city’s people, its cycling culture, and the points of intersection with art, design, food, urban culture. David suggested me to make an video installation, therefore the theme was set, cycling.
Art Video, Art film, Video installation for shown at the Launch Party of the first Issue of Chalet Magazine at the Rox Gallery in the Lower East Side, New York. This is a project I made during an artist in residency program from a swiss grant. The idea of this film came from the meeting the founder and creative director of the Magazine David Trumpf.
The magazine explores cities from the perspective of the bike to understand a city’s people, its cycling culture, and the points of intersection with art, design, food, urban culture. David suggested me to make an video installation, therefore the theme was set, cycling.
Hour long talks, brainstorm, culture sharing and bending memories lead our conversations from sports sweat marks to folding chairs with a detour by Albert Camus on a mountain peak. I mentioned David that the fate of those olympian athletes reminded me of the Greek Myth of Sisyphus, punished for his impudence to roll a rock up a mountain knowing that once reaching the top it will undeniably and irrevocably roll back at the bottom. And he’ll be force to repeat the same task for the rest of eternity. Growing up in Europe, during the tour de France, one cannot escape seeing this playing on the catodic screens around the house and bistrot. As a kid I personally always remember associating these tv sports as the most boring thing that would inspire me with sad melancholy.
Chalet Magazine, New York
I therefore thought as an adult about exploring this and make a deep dive into the tour de France world. I procured myself dozen of hours of tour de France DVDs that I’ve digitalized and watched, fast forwarded, rewinded, and froze once something will spark ideas. 2 months of cuting, pasting, visual effect softwaring, layouts, cutouts, rotoscoping, image tracking, sound designing lead to a 5 minutes long video.
The film was looping on tv monitor on the first floor.
Design of the flyer by me for the event.
Type: Simplon, Swiss BP
photo by : Phil Penman