Le Récit d'A consists of a series of tales which take place within the same video : parallel universes which reflect each other without ever meeting. The tale of Andrew, a travelogue and the thoughts of Edmond Jabes are all elements in the free play of the composition. "I use autobiographical traces (made with scans and in Super 8) to speak of vaster spaces : the existential desert of Jabes; the desert of the 1990s; our youth devastated by AIDS; my life deprived of its youth. The video also speaks of a way of seeing, of a change in consciousness, and of what can open up, even in the face of such a seemingly disastrous result".
Esther Valiquette
Credits
Technical information
Documentation
Commentary by Nicole Gingras, Curator
A diary, a travelogue, confidences : this video sketches the portrait of a discreet relationship between a man and a woman. There is the terse narrative of an HIV-positive man, a landscape slowly engulfed by the shadow of fatal sickness and the fragile fates of two beings. At the very end, we understand, despite the videomaker’s consummate discretion, that Andrew’s story is also Esther Valiquette’s. Punctuated by quotations from Susan Sontag and Edmond Jabès, this video is also a poetic rumination on the desert.
