the month
Extenderis
Comprised of works hand-picked by members of the Vidéographe team, video of the month explores Vidéographe's vast collection and offers insight into the team behind the centre. New month, new video.
After several years of film studies at Concordia University, Mathilde Fauteux has been working in the arts and film industry for over three years. Notably, she worked as part of the short film programming team at Festival du nouveau cinéma. As Distribution Coordinator at Vidéographe, Mathilde is looking forward to pursuing her passion for new talent and new forms of expression.
Synopsis
Constructed as a contemporary psalm, this experimental video reflects on the origins of life and the vast archival content of DNA. Extendris revolves around the ideas of Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, 1987), according to whom human beings, as well as all living organisms, are the temporary receptacles of the DNA code. We serve the DNA and not the reverse. A shock to anthropocentric understanding, the idea was considered as heresy within the scientific community. In this sense, Extendris is a heretic psalm.
A word from the team
From a scientific perspective that defies expectations, raw explanation, and the need to prove, Esther Valiquette deconstructs the anthropocentric relationship we have with evolutionary theories and the issue of speciesism. Taking as its starting point the thesis of Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (1987), this video work unfolds around multiple devices that contribute to the subversion of historical and genetic determinism, inviting us instead to think of the body as its own technology, governed by principles that will always elude us. Not without its flaws, the aesthetic form of the video, combining visual archives, image editing, and modeling, recalls the intersection between the body and technology that frames Esther Valiquette's entire body of work, namely in Le Récit d'A.
Mathilde Fauteux
Distribution Coordinator
