Joséphine Berthou — 11h20 — Frac île-de-france, le Plateau — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 26 → November 3, 2024

Opening: Wednesday 25.09, 6pm-9pm

Joséphine Berthou makes fiction films with a strong documentary and musical comedy element. Her films are incorporated into large-scale installations, and consider the roles that each person acquires in a globalized society where information circulates with ever-increasing immediacy. Joséphine Berthou casts her eye over a wide range of professions: gendarmes, truck drivers, rappers, Internet moderators, hospital cooks and con artists. Based on these singular professional worlds, she creates a narrative, a fiction in which the emotions of the characters are expressed in words and music.

For the Project Room, we’re accompanying Ferdinand, the protagonist of a 2021 film, on his journey. A truck driver and toy deliveryman, Ferdinand sings in his lorry to pass the time and criss-crosses a variety of territories and landscapes day and night. From their shuttle, some aliens, intrigued by the melody coming from the lorry, decide to follow him and send him one of their own. We are invited to watch the film in the very place of the central character, in the midst of cardboard boxes filmed in plastic and glittering with coloured lights, or on a bunk bed and lorry seats: Ferdinand drives his lorry, sings, seduces a cow, dines with colleagues in a roadside restaurant, watches a couple dance in a waking dream or tries to establish a dialogue with the alien child who invites himself into his vehicle. In this way, we gain access to Ferdinand’s solitude as he imagines another life, which he ends up pursuing, guided by the voice of this child from elsewhere.

Joséphine Berthou was born in Rambouillet in 1996. She lives and works in Paris. From 2015 to 2021, she studied film and visual arts at HEAD in Geneva. In 2021, she entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris, from which she graduated in 2023.

Curator: Maëlle Dault