Catalogue > At random

The video installation okinawa was born of a dialogue between Amie Barouh, artist and filmmaker, and Elodie Royer, curator and researcher, as part of her current work linking the practices of women artists rooted in different territories affected by disasters and environmental upheaval in Japan. It was with this in mind that the film was shot during fieldwork in Okinawa, encountering artists and damaged places, activists and shamans, all of whom share a deep connection with their living environments. Through the voices, faces and landscapes encountered, Okinawa is both a dreamlike journey into the spatial and temporal depths of this archipelago and a testimony to its geopolitical and environmental stakes - from the daily lives of its inhabitants to protests against American bases, from evenings shared over karaoke to struggles to preserve ecosystems threatened by the ever-increasing militarization of this territory. With, in order of appearance, the voices of the Henoko blue collective canoeing against the expansion of military bases on the sea in Oura Bay, photographer Ishikawa Mao, Perry of the US Marine Corps, artist and video-maker Yamashiro Chikako, Sawa Koyado, a shaman in Kudakajima, and Yanchii, a mechanic in Ginowan.

Amie Barouh defends an experimental documentary that gives a voice to people living on the margins, such as the Roma community. Her work is openly a filmed diary, in keeping with the idea that all knowledge is situated, and that all cinema, no matter how informative, is necessarily subjective. Motivated more by affinities than by a dogmatic desire to “make cinema”, Amie Barouh's films, somewhere between documentaries and visual essays, aim above all to convey an experience, taken as such, and often start from an event marking the artist's life, like an encounter. Amie Barouh does not simply observe those she films. She lives with them, or has forged a special bond with them. Driven by curiosity and the desire to meet members of the Roma community, the artist was “adopted” by a family and integrated their camp in the Paris suburbs. After living with them for 2 years, she began to film them. Not seeking to mask the marks of subjective expression, Amie Barouh's videos break completely with the illusion of documentary objectivity. The artist not only brings her personal history into play, but also her own body in the subject matter of her documentaries. This is particularly true of Je peux changer mais pas à 100% (I can change, but not 100%), a work that recounts her failed love affair with Bobby, a Romanian Roma crack addict who lives on the streets by petty theft. Amie Barouh's films are always driven by the search for the right proximity to the people whose images she captures. The “right” distance, however, is always unstable, much to the viewer's delight. The camera, the artist's third eye and third arm, negotiates in real time the nature of the relationships she - as a documentarian, but above all as a person - has with her subjects. The subjective staging and editing embrace her heartfelt impulses, resulting in images that are at times impressionistic, at times realistic, capturing the complexity of documenting worlds to which we don't belong. Julie Ackermann