Catherine DALFIN

Can you go quickly to the sun? Experimental doc. | dv | color | 45'0'' | France | 2008 © Catherine Dalfin In Latvia, some people lived on an old military camp built in the middle of the forest by Soviet in order to accomodate an ultra radio telescope powerful to spy North America. Independence (in 1992) had not only positive effects on their life. More than ever, it is necessary for them to invent how make the life possible and pleasant. Artist statement Director`s note The Irbene camp was built by the Soviet authorities in Latvia to house 2 000 soldiers, scientists and their families and as a base for an ultra-powerful radio telescope built to spy on communications between Europe and North America during the Cold War. The military left the site in 1993 when Latvia became independent. Shortly after their departure, several people chose to settle there. My desire to film the camp took form during a journey in 2004. The raw beauty of the landscapes and the weight of the emptiness emanating from the site caught my attention. Having come there out of choice or because they had renounced the difficulties of existence, I was moved by the people occupying the site. I wanted to convey a sense of how people appropriate a borderline space and how they conceive of their happiness and unhappiness. Or, to put it another way, how people inhabit the world and are inhabited by it. The title, Can you go quickly to the sun?, refers to the work carried out by a team of Polish researchers present on the site at the same time as I was, but also to the transition still underway in the former Soviet republics from a utopia in shreds to an equally questionable liberal model. I broach the site via the present, a here and now that favours a sensitive rendering of time and space, beyond all overpowering discourses. At first simple presences in the landscape, the people progressively acquire depth and become incarnate. We watch them going about their daily occupations without necessarily understanding the meaning of what we are seeing, before progressively acquiring reference points via a kind of acclimatization of our gaze. Since my first films, I have founded my work on the idea of a presence in the world, this fragile and silent thing that emanates from certain individuals and certain places, and which is capable of immediately and implicitly expressing a certain relation to the world. I film people and their sensitive environment, as one would film a landscape in which everything is on the surface. For this reason, I don`t always translate the foreign language sequences, choosing most of the time only to translate what I myself managed to understand at the time of filming. Hence the scene where the three women sit discussing what "bonjour madame" (“hello madam”) means. I understand the frustration people might at first feel watching this scene without subtitles. But the meaning of this scene lies less in what is said than in the situation, the attitudes, the faces, the gestures and the mimics that accompany their words. It`s less the content that is important than what the timbre and energy of their voices reveal about their personalities. What I try to capture is the relationship to the environment in which they live, or survive, in the broadest sense of the term, that is to say, the political one too. Beyond the somewhat anecdotal aspect their words would have if translated, it is thus something of their "interior verity" that transpires, to use the writer-journalist Svetlana Alexievitch`s expression. The other astonishing thing is that we realize that, listening attentively, we are able to understand a language we don`t know much better that we would have first imagined. I film on the margins. My relation to the real is ambivalent – a desire to render the real but also a desire to turn it into the site of an experience, the experience of what attaches us to the world and of what renders it impossible for us. But also the experience of "giving to see" – what distance to adopt, how to cut into the real while avoiding the picturesque, how to show the intimate by other means than those normally used, how to envisage my own presence; in short, how to explore the limits between the filmed and the filmmaker. List of exhibition, filmography... Education MA in French Language and Literature (University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III) MA in History of Art (University Sorbonne Paris IV) BA in Communication Studies (University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III) Advanced English Beginner`s Russian Professional Experience Freelance art critic for various contemporary art magazines and journals : Mouvement, Megalopole, Beaux-arts magazine… (1994-2000). Participated in the creation of the online contemporary art journal Odradek, www.odradek.org (1998). Participated in the creation of a transversal journal on the theme of the town, Vis-à-Villes (1995). Radio documentary producer. Production of contemporary art and/or social documentaries for France Culture, the French public radio`s cultural station : Nuits magnétiques, Surpris par la nuit, Atelier de création radiophonique… (1991-2001). Awards, grants, residencies 2007 Artist in residence, Moks Centre, Mooste, Estonia 2006 CNC (Centre national de la cinématographie) experimental documentary writing grant 2005 Artist in residence, K@2 Centre, Liepaja Karosta, Latvia 2003 CNC short film grant 2001 GREC (Groupe de recherche et d’écriture cinémato- graphique) short film grant 1999 Theatre writing award (Association Beaumarchais) Video — Amères oasis/Bitter oasis (2008) DV, col., documentary essay/video art (in pre-production) A project on southern Moroccan oases. — Greetings from Mooste (2008) DV, col., documentary essay/video art (in post-production) Film shot during artist residency at Moks Centre (Mooste, Estonia). Like a not fully formulated idea, a mirror held up to my own work as a filmmaker, I seek, without managing to find, the centre of this village I am resident in. — Can you go quickly to the sun? (2006-2008) 45’, dv, col., experimental documentary, Fin Avril Production “ And then gradually, I begin to discover that there are other people in the environs, those I call the invisible, who live around here, who try to eke out an existence, who try to make this life possible and pleasant even, either in the ruins of the Soviet camp or on the edge of the forest, a stone`s throw away from the radio telescope. ” — passante/passer-by (2005-2006) 27’, dv, col., documentary/video art Film shot during artist residency at K@2 Centre, Liepaja Karosta, Latvia. In Liepaja Karosta, a former Soviet garrison town, I filmed the neighbour-hood I was resident in as if I was approaching another world. Selections and screenings : Paris Cinema Festival (Pointligneplan) at the L’Entrepôt cinema, Festival Étonnante Lettonie (gallery Stimultania, Strasbourg), Rencontres internationales Paris-Berlin. — E 161 (2005) 12’, dv, col., video art In a supermarket, faceless people come and go, looking for something invisible. — latvian song (2005) 11’30, dv, col. fiction/video art On a coach driving through the Latvian countryside, I can`t take my eyes off a woman sat in front of me who struggles in vain to fight off the sleepiness engulfing her. — dog blink (2004) 4’10, S16 and dv, b&w and col., video art Two gazes meet, that of a dog and that of a video surveillance camera. Selections and screenings : Rencontres internationales Paris-Berlin. Films — l’instant suivant/the following moment (2004) 24`, 35 mm, col., fiction, Chaz Productions A film on desire and its opposite, the loss of the obvious in the couple. — slnd (sans lieu ni date)/no place no date (2001) 7`, 16 mm, col., fiction, production le GREC A fleeting initiation into contemporary violence, as experienced by a young woman in the streets of Paris. Selections and screenings : Pantin, Paris Tout Courts festival, Rencontres internationales Paris-Berlin, One minute before (Hong Kong), Point- ligneplan (Femis). Contemporary art Participation in the “Just from…” artists` collective led by the artist Alberto Sorbelli. — just from the top (1997) Internet project (commissioned by the DAP, Délégation aux arts plastiques) Video participation : Hommage à Harlan County USA/Homage to Harlan County USA. — just from Cynthia (1995) Mixed-media art work on CD-ROM, acquired by the Centre Georges Pompidou National Museum of Modern Art. Creation of an audio piece Immaculée conception/Immaculate conception. Writing of the CD-ROM accompanying booklet.