Under her gaze, the film becomes a vibrant skin, sensitive to light, marked by its environment. This is how Yasmina Benabderrahmane represents her medium. As a photographer and experimental filmmaker, the artist traces on it the stories of bodies and encounters, of places and individuals crossed.
Here, the skin meets the henna paste, the earth jostles against the wind, the worker’s meticulous gesture ricochets off the grandmother’s. The light catches the animal, metallic, and mineral surfaces with the same intensity. La Bête(2020),La Renardière (2016), Bain céleste (2015): the titles of the artist’s works carry a taste of reverie between collective history and esoteric tale. Behind the grainy surface and spontaneous framing, a reflection of the author’s peregrinations, one perceives the tradition of the super-8 film diary of a Joseph Morder. one perceives the tradition of the super-8 film diary of a Joseph Morder. The epidermal material of the body and the film is also in the vein of the French personal cinema of the late 20th century Between the one and the other, there emerges, above all, an impression of care and sharing. Is it not her story that Yasmina Benabderrahmane cuts up and recomposes at the same time as the filmic and photographic image? At the limit of abstraction, the macro and close-up shots offer the object without revealing it in its entirety, approaching the subject without betraying its intimacy. The human being is composed in the midst of the elements, in the body of the black and white or color film, playing with desaturation as if it were a timeless fog where each image exists in complementarity with its fellow images.
Yasmina Benabderrahmane, La Bête, un conte moderne, LE BAL et MACK BOOKS, 2020
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