Laura Gozlan — À propos — Slash Paris

Laura Gozlan’s artistic practice feeds on scientific, architectural utopias and the communities they build, with a keen interest in how they are represented in genre cinema. She creates video fluxes by putting together images she borrowed or shot herself, which she treats in a non-hierarchical way, merging them with a digitally produced soundtrack created beforehand. It’s phases and patterns direct towards altered states of consciousness. She finds as much inspiration in the giallo* as in the 70-80’s anticipation films and in scientific documents. All three encompass archetypes and techno-utopist myths, yielding information on the Cold War’s military-industrial complex, its ideological bipolarisation and its conjunction with counterculture utopias.
Educated in Les Arts Décoratifs de Paris and then in Le Fresnoy — Studio National des Arts Contemporains until 2007, Laura Gozlan progressively reoriented the fiction film techniques so as to develop projection devices assembling documents and models, and then sculptural environments moulded in wax and hosting projections similar to Gene Youngblood’s Expended Cinema. When combined, these elements work together in a way that makes the viewer consider the image not as a simple surface, but as a space. With de-fragmentation, crumpling and reflection operations, she conducts research on the three-dimensionality of projected images. Laura Gozlan uses a video projector as a diffraction brush, reverberating from a reflective surface to a transparent surface (two or three as-sembled glass plates, crystals, etc.), generating a spatial defragmented projection that seems to constantly re-enact the everlasting swing between the images’ de-materialisation and re-materialisation. The projected matter, sometimes mingled with giallo’s codified and poisonous eroticism or the degree zero one can find in scientific archives, exposes an archetypal texture that erects in a flow of abstract, instinctual fiction, and its depersonalised affect. The found-footage technique leads precisely to that image detachment, which has more to do with collective sensitivity than with individual sensitivity.
The moulded or projected wax has a role to play in this uncertainty, in the way it materially evokes the transformation figures usually associated to alchemy, and the viewer is then in charge of mentally restoring the fractured image appearing on it. These interstices allow for a critical distance to be reinstated, the viewer caught between a compulsive attraction to images as well as an affect re-subjectivation.

• Exploitation film sub-genre, mainly from the Alpine region, involving thriller, eroticism and horror movie genres in a very stylized and sometimes experimental staging. Giallo reached its peak during the Years of Lead, with filmmakers such as Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and later, Dario Argento.