Surfacing | Tandem | Films

Behind the closed doors of her studio, Lisa Sartorio recycles, deforms, recomposes and sculpts images of war that her not her own work.Beyond the photographic material, her art questions the loss of impact of these images and opens our eyes.

About

Synopsis

Behind the closed doors of her studio, Lisa Sartorio recycles, deforms, recomposes and sculpts images of war that her not her own work.Beyond the photographic material, her art questions the loss of impact of these images and opens our eyes.

The artist

Lisa Sartorio was born in Tunisia in 1970. A photographer and visual artist, she lives and works in Paris.

She is represented by the Binôme gallery in Paris

Technical data

Director and cinematographer	Stanislav Valade
Editor	Nicolas Blondel
Music composer	Benjamin Mathevet Chris Adamski
Duration	05:36

Chronicle

War Frequency

"In the skin of the image, I seek a material to awaken thought"
Lisa Sartorio.

In the obscurity of an out-of-tune world, Lisa Sartorio's mental ostinato rekindles the fires of memory. What are images of war? Devastated witnesses, or the casualties of flame-throwers loaded with the invisible ink of darkrooms? After the crash of arms on the raw nerve of the ear comes the pale sadness of great disasters.

"What comes next, when all has been said?" With enlightened blindness, Lisa Sartorio apprehends the frozen space of the image. As one touch follows another, the old photograph becomes an instrument, a sensitive piano that the hand gently retunes to the reality of horror. A spellbinding ceremony against the light, where veils of mist, velvet, silk and paper weave themselves between her fingers.

A fascinating language of signs on the image's speechless surface, before the colour of a voice revives the ordeal of the past. One of those singular voices, fragile and low, which, shattered at the cliff's edge, are all the more intense. The artist's empathetic voice, as she offers her face to the one disfigured, voice set in metal, armed with resistance.

Swept along by the magical forces of these incantations, Stanislav Valade, Chris Adamsky and Benjamin Mathevet have made a pact with their creative demons. Brothers in soul and in suffering, they have united with Lisa Sartorio to lend movement, music and a helping hand to her work. And from the acknowledgement of this pact, born of a human earthquake, emerges the prophetic power of the hydra.

If not annihilated, Lisa Sartorio's fear, inseparable from the emotion of compassion, creates an interstice, a relief where, for a fleeting moment, the surface state is overcome.

Viviane Montagnon, writer
Saint Germain du bois - July 2020

Viviane Montagnon was born in Lyon and lives in Bresse. She is a writer, an author of songs and theatre, an actor, and a singer. One of her latest works Le Panier de Lucette (Lucette’s Basket) was published in 2014 by Editions Aréopage.
To be published soon, her new story "Honoré" will be published by "L'Astre Bleu".