Catalogue > At random

Drawn by her interest in history and architecture and the ambiguity emerging from modernist utopias, the Belgian artist Sophie Nys left in January 2011 for Rio de Janeiro to shoot the film ?Parque do Flamengo?. From this a semi-documentary resulted whose main character is the Parque do Flamengo, a park designed by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx between 1954 and 1959. Simultaneously a painter, sculptor, poet and botanist, Roberto Burle Marx is known worldwide as one of the greatest landscape architects of the twentieth century. The film by Sophie Nys is a 45 minutes uncut travelling shot and represents the whole of the park as an isolated entity. The space is crossed from A to Z at a walking pace. As a stroll, the route follows the curved and sensual line of the park. The film is a physical and plastic portrait of the place, a recording of a living space between culture and nature. At Sophie Nys?s request, musician Arto Lindsay conceived an original soundtrack for the film, using the list of plants featured in the park as a starting point for this new composition.

Sophie Nys (º1974, Borgerhout) studied at Sint-Lukas Ghent and finished a post-graduate program at Jan van Eyck in Maastricht. She brings conceptual and minimalistic artistic strategies to their logical and formal limits by exploiting the broad artistic license possible within the contemporary art milieu. Far from being flippant, her works ? although seemingly ironic ? maintain their eloquence as poetic reflections on her subjects derived from the everyday. Her films have been shown at International Short Film Festival Detmold, FIDMarseille, BOZAR, e-flux, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Argos, Courtisane festival,...