Trying to describe this still, silent place, of an undetermined age, crisscrossed by invisible paths, entails reconfiguring it and revealing its spatiality through movement and human presence. Merely being there would limit one to absorbing the space’s story to participate in it is to take action. In her videos, Elise Leclercq invites people who are encountered there to transpose their everyday gestures and to live them in a relationship with a place in proposing that they themselves create a visual and symbolic narrative in situ. Here, there is no cinematic direction where one drifts away in assigned roles all the people play their own characters. Each questions the character in his or her own way through distancing that the ritualized movement makes possible by writing in the space, what the artist calls a microefiction.
All of these sequences of shots outline directions in time, question the relationship between a person in motion and a place, without ever looking to give the viewer an unequivocal answer. The ritual calls together the diversity of relationships in reality and makes possible a mediation of daily life in a space of open time. “The rituals invented with the people I meet try to initiate a deviation, a subversion of reality, while leaning on an environment and everyday gestures,” she says. “The Way It Goes,” a sequence of still shots filmed at the center of Ramallah in Palestine, could thus be a micro-fiction. But the character well and truly exists in the daily life of this city and comes to question an artistic approach that fictionalizes reality while sometimes finding itseif facing a reality tat is probably already fictional.
Beyond these videos which were produced, it‘s the globality of an approach that unfurls in the meeting between reality and fiction, searching for the utopic part of our lives. Thus the photographic and audio project entitled “Amador enquete,” stems from a common will of the artist and a resident to produce a gesture: inviting the residents of a neighborhood in the North of France to rechristen streets bearing the names of classical French authors. The social imagining, momentarily suspended, leaves room for the individual imagining. The relationship between the two appears conflicting, paradoxical, and perhaps impossible it points out the utopic character of a common imagining.
