“My village is my matrix,” says Mimosa Échard about the hippie community she grew up in in the Cévennes. She chose her daily family life as the subject of her first feature film. Using a vast personal archive of footage shot on MiniDV over close to a decade, she superimposes various scenes in a two-hour stream of images. Accompanied by music composed by Raphaël Hénard, this reflection on time simultaneously confronts plants and flowers, pop packaging and old-fashioned interiors. This juxtaposition of divergent elements is inspired by her experience as a child discovering MTV culture on television in the middle of the wilderness. According to Mimosa Échard, this assemblage of forms and colours has a ghostly and poetic effect and is based on a “sensual relationship” with the video medium. The artist summons to the screen the plastic experiments that she would later develop in her studio, as she explains: “The People resonates with everything I am now doing—transparency, liquidity, the cohabitation of human and non-human worlds.”

Text written by Franny Tachon as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.

Exhibition