Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

In the heart of the Amazon River, four years to the day after a devastating fire consumed the National Museum of Brazil, a diverse and passionate group of individuals gathers to rewrite history in a captivating journey of rebirth. "Apagada" is a 20-minute film by Unfold and Alexandre Humbert for Atlas of Lost Finds, an international research project sparked by the fire that turned 18 million of the museum's artefacts into ashes on September 2, 2018. Among the few remnants of this renowned collection are several digital 3D scans, which we can consider the digital 'spirit' of these lost treasures. A multidisciplinary team of Brazilian, Indigenous and international makers and researchers worked together to breathe new life into these spirits, focusing on the lost artefacts of pre-Columbian ceramics from Brazil's Marajo region. The team masterfully combines ceramic 3D printing with ancestral craftsmanship knowledge to recreate these artefacts on the very island where they originated from over five hundred years ago. "Apagada" explores the profound impact of revitalizing erased heritage. It raises essential questions about the role of digitisation in preserving heritage and the significance of this endeavour for local communities, which have lost their history due to fire, or colonial past. The film celebrates creativity, collaboration, and the powerful potential of rediscovery, questioning, and cherishing our shared heritage.

Alexandre Humbert (1989, FR) is a conceptual designer and filmmaker who writes, directs and constructs Cinematographic Objects. He graduated with honors from ESAD Reims (FR) in 2011 and from the Contextual Design Master department of Design Academy Eindhoven (NL) in 2013. He has since collaborated with a large number of designers, artists, architects and cultural institutions to poetically stage objects, gestures and contexts through installations, fictions, documentaries and experimental films. From 2014 to 2016, he trained in various production techniques and developed his critical sense of the image through the production of several short formats. His unique approach received recognition in 2017 with the launch of the film series Object Interview, 19 episodes involving 103 contributors in Europe in which 31 objects discuss seemingly innocuous topics: fishing, psychoanalysis, marriage, insomnia... By giving these objects a voice, his films emphasize the emotional, verbal and non-verbal interaction that exists with all the objects that surround us, whatever their form. He was then invited to explore the narrative potential of objects in a variety of contexts, including Design Museum Gent (BE), Musée d'Art Moderne du Luxembourg (LU) in 2018, Jerusalem Design Week (IL), Schloss Hollenegg for Design (AU) and Guangzhou Museum of Art (CHN) in 2019. In the same year, he co-curated the exhibition "The Object is Absent" at MU Art Space, which was nominated for the Dutch Design Award 2020 and he also directed the fiction film Sleeping Beauties, shot at Burj al Babas in Turkey, in which he links architecture to its pictorial representation in a context where screens continue to multiply. In 2020, after completing his film Les Impatients, shot during the first lockdown, he was offered a a one-year residency at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (FR) to follow the life of the museum through its collections and exhibitions, extracting contextual poetic narratives. The designer-cinematographer directed The object becomes in 2021, following the attitudes, words and gestures of nine protagonists of circular design, resource regeneration in Belgium. The film premiered at Palazzo Anteo Cinema during Salone Del Mobile. Awarded with the Mondes Nouveaux Grant from the French Ministry of Culture in 2022, he completed the production of his first experimental feature-length documentary, D'un moment à l'autre, which follows the production process of 35 artists across France and premiered in 2024. His latest film, Apagada, shot in the Brazilian Amazon and co-directed with Belgian design studio Unfold, has just received the Henry van de Velde Award in Belgium and an honourable mention at MDFF 24. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally and is part of the collections of Design Museum Gent (BE), Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (FR) and MUDAM Luxembourg (LU). Alongside his practice, he teaches film construction at ENSCI Les Ateliers (FR) and the Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), and lectures on the subject at numerous other schools.