Camera in hand, Anne-Charlotte Finel explores interstices and boundary zones: between light and darkness, wild and man-made spaces, animal and plant, human and non-human, living and machine, etc. With its exploration of these thresholds, the Respiro exhibition at La Criée centre d’art contemporain offers a visual and aural experience that questions and blurs the contours of our perceptions and representations.

In Respiro, a first version of which was presented in autumn 2023 at the Centre d’Art de Saint-Fons, Anne-Charlotte Finel draws on a series of recent pieces to create an environment made of darkness and shards of light, of furtive yet slow movements, of blurs, details and materials. To create her sometimes phantasmagorical images, the artist uses only her camera. There’s no mise en scène, just a patient, attentive recording of the living; an alliance between the artist’s eye and the mechano-electronic eye of her camera.

At La Criée, the artist has reconfigured the space of the art centre into three areas, structured by oblique partitions. Each area plunges the visitor into an atmosphere that is both specific and permeable to the neighbouring spaces, through a slight diffusion effect. The ensemble is underpinned by a soundtrack composed by Voiski that reinforces the impression of detachment from reality with its abstract and naturalistic electronic layers.