House and home
2015
Video – 52 minutes
Music : Federico Mompou, Musica Callada
Inspired by a quote from La Vie Matérielle by Marguerite Duras, Emmanuelle Michaux begins filming in a holiday home as she awaits her husband. That summer, she reads a children’s edition of The Odyssey to her son. Later she mixes with these images a film of a holiday that her father made in Greece in 1965 and amateur films of weddings or mediterranean holidays.
This work takes the same puzzle form as Les Anonymes. From this apparent dispersion, the spectator recomposes the story thanks to vision and sound material that questions relations between men and women, maternity and woman’s place in creation.
A modern-day Penelope, Emmanuelle Michaux uses fallible, even trivial everyday life to create a mise en abyme in the myth of Ulysees or what Paul Ardenne would call “aesthetics of existence”, a work that we can all see reflected in our own lives.