Catalogue > At random

Filmed in the gorges of the Haut-Allier, Le quotidien is the portrait of a man who has chosen to live alone and apart, in a cabin at the edge of a forest. The images record his everyday gestures, tied to the essential needs of human existence: drinking, eating, washing, mending, beginning again. “Like an anthropologist-filmmaker, Jean-Baptiste Perret chooses a site — often rural — and immerses himself in it for long periods. He builds relationships with the people he meets there, filming their living spaces and their knowledge. Shot in the gorges of the Haut-Allier, Le quotidien portrays a man who has chosen to live alone, removed from human society, in a cabin at the forest’s edge. The videomaker captures his daily gestures, linked to the essential needs of human life: drinking, eating, washing, repairing, starting again. The film forms part of a broader enquiry into marginal life paths within rural contexts, in which other relationships to the living world, to territory, and to ecology are invented.” (Work Method, Guillaume Désanges and Coline Davenne)

After studying ecology, Jean-Baptiste Perret worked for several years in environmental protection within local authorities. A 2018 graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, he has continued to pursue his interest in rural contexts through a filmmaking practice that takes the form of films and video installations. His work is driven by the question of care, which he understands as an attentiveness to vulnerability, inseparable from the regenerative capacities of individuals. His approach is grounded in documentary enquiry and draws on methods borrowed from anthropology that challenge conventional criteria of objectivity, placing affect at the very centre of the research process. He is also inspired by microhistory, which seeks to step away from official narratives of the many in order to focus on individuals and their own ways of understanding the world. Jean-Baptiste Perret films people he encounters in their everyday situations, engaging with their life paths, their surroundings, and their skills. Through varying degrees of staging — always leaving room for improvisation — subjective accounts and fictional strategies intermingle. His work has been shown at the Institut d’art contemporain (IAC) in Villeurbanne as part of the 15th Lyon Biennale, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, at Fondation d’entreprise Ricard (Paris), at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris), at the Chapelle Saint-Jacques (Saint-Gaudens), at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), at FID Marseille, at the Festival Hors-Pistes at the Centre Pompidou, at the États généraux du documentaire in Lussas, and more recently at the 66th Salon de Montrouge. Jean-Baptiste Perret is represented by Galerie Salle Principale in Paris.