03.10.26 - 24.01.27
la Boîte Noire
Audrey & Maxime Jean-Baptiste. Écoutez le battement de nos images
Écoutez le battement de nos images is a video work that recounts the fictional story of a young woman living in Kourou, French Guiana.
Through her memories, she revisits her emotions and questions regarding the transformation of her region, marked by the creation of the space centre in the 1960s. As rockets take off and engineers from mainland France settle with their families in this new town, the narrator gives voice to a perspective often absent from the archives: that of the people of French Guiana.
This work was produced as part of a creative residency at the Observatoire de l’Espace, the cultural laboratory of the CNES (National Centre for Space Studies).
It draws on the CNES’s video archives, which it reinterprets to offer a contemporary perspective on the past, and more specifically on the preserved traces of that era: the documentary films shot by the CNES and the first-hand accounts of Guyanese people.
Écoutez le battement de nos images is a reworking of archive footage, drawn from various films, edited to the rhythm of a fictional narrative. This narrative is enriched by oral testimonies and the sensibility of the artists Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste, whose work explores the margins and off-screen spaces of archive footage. In these films, the people of French Guiana are often filmed, but rarely heard. The voice-over, written based on their own words, lends new depth to the footage shot by CNES. It challenges and complements a narrative traditionally focused on technological progress, without, however, offering an explicit interpretation of the images.
Without seeking to analyse the archives, this work reintroduces the perspective of the people of French Guiana into the history of the space centre, thereby offering a human and intimate perspective on a chapter often dominated by technical and institutional narratives.
Audrey Jean-Baptiste is a director of documentary and fiction films. Her first documentary, Fabulous (2019), was selected for around fifty international festivals, including IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), FIDBA (International Documentary Film Festival, Buenos Aires) and Frameline (San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival).
Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker. His audiovisual and performance-based work straddles the line between documentary film and contemporary art. Nou voix (2018), his autobiographical video work, received the Jury Prize at the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris (Paris Festival of Alternative and Experimental Cinema).
Winners of a call for creative projects centred on the audiovisual archives of the construction of the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste presented the video work Écoutez le battement de nos images for the first time in the exhibition Dans la clameur des archives (Amidst the clamour of the archives) at CNES during the 2020 edition of Nuit Blanche Paris.
Audrey et Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Écoutez le battement de nos images, 2020
Video with sound, 15 mins
Collection of the CNES Space Observatory – On deposit at Les Abattoirs, Museum – Frac Occitanie Toulouse
