Camille Varenne
Blakata 50-minute documentary western
Camille Varenne is an artist-videographer. She works regularly in Burkina Faso, notably at the Imagine Institute and with the FESPACO (Pan-African Film and Audiovisual Festival) in Ouagadougou. She graduated in Art Research (2018) from the Clermont Métropole Art School where she is now an associate researcher in the "Figures de transition" research group.
Blakata 50-minute documentary western
Blakata 50-minute documentary western
Blakata 50-minute documentary western
BLAKATA
50-minute documentary western, produced in Burkina Faso in 2019 Blakata means to let go in Diula, one of the languages spoken in Burkina Faso.
This is a documentary western shot with the horsemen of Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso. The Burkinabè riders, called “Warriors” embody the powerful equestrian tradition of Burkina Faso.
The stallion is the emblem of the country and has many animist rituals associated with it. Urban centaurs, they also inspire fear and mistrust. The actors play their own role, blurring the lines between fiction and documentary. Sometimes they tell themselves in front of the camera, then they invent themselves and fall into a fantasy story. The Riders identify with the Twilight Cowboys, those outsiders in search of dignity, in resistance against the established order. An African western shifts our focus by offering hybrid characters, drawing on multiple references. It is the image of a mixed society, with keen eyes on the world capable of thinking about its representation, of appropriating it and through this process of defining its place. This brings us back to the concept of Afropolitanism described by Achille Mbembé. African cowboys fabricate "emancipatory utopias", "of the re-enchantment of the world" "a balanced North-South globalization", a thought where borders are crossable and the imaginations of others, those who are far away geographically and come from another culture, are accessible.
“ Far from a universalist idealism or the idea of an objective truth, his films open up distances that go beyond antagonisms, reveal the differences among similar people and put tension on reflection. (Cecilia Almirón Text extract)
Video installation on 2 screens, projected video 1 of 30 minutes and video 2 of 15 minutes on screen
Kaynãn Podesiad
KasumoPro channel
PEDRA E POEIRA
Video installation co-produced with André Parente, in the collective framework of Suspended Spaces and her residency organized in Fordlândia, Brazil, 2020. The city of Fordlândia was created by Ford in the 1920s to harvest rubber in the heart of the Amazon. In August 2018, the Suspended Spaces collective organized a residency in this place in collaboration with the Brazilian collective Fotoativa.
During our stay, we met Kaynãn Podesiad, an 11-year-old boy who grew up in Fordlândia. He is also a youtuber and founder of the KasumoPro channel where he publishes his video montages made from manga and videos gleaned from Youtube. He offers Andre Parente and I a guided tour of the city where real and historical facts mingle with anecdotes and childhood imaginations. The film Pedra e Poiera retraces this meeting punctuated by the narration of a History in motion, a shared story.
“Behind the camera, Camille Varenne conducts both visual and human research oscillating between documentary and fiction, art and anthropology”
Camille Varenne films have been shown at the Salon de Montrouge 2019, at the 69th edition of Jeune Création (2020), at the Fabrique Pola de Bordeaux (2016) and at the Creux de l'Enfer de Thiers (2015), at the Emerging Documentary Festival, or at the Fotoativa cultural space in Belem (Brazil). She has the support of the production company The Kingdome.