Boris Labbé

Trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and then the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême, the work of Boris Labbé (1987, FR) quickly made the rounds, whether at contemporary art exhibitions, international film festivals, or audiovisual concerts. His latest short film La Chute was in the special session selection at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week. In 2020 he collaborated with choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and signed the video scenography of the show Swan Lake. He is currently developing a virtual reality project(Mono no aware, Sacrebleu Productions) and a video set design with composer Lucas Fagin(Glass House, produced by Ensemble Cairn).

 

Mono No Aware is a virtual reality experience built around references from the history of Japanese art and literature (The Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Notes of Chevets), and unfolds like a great sensory fresco with strong emotional potential. A heterogeneous collection of drawn, animated and sound scenes are captured in digital material, recreating a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth of fractal architectures, inhabited by plants, objects, animals, men, women, motifs and calligraphy. Mono no aware is a Japanese aesthetic and spiritual concept, which can be translated as “empathy with things” or “sensitivity to the ephemeral”. The virtual wandering space allows us to access the various scenes according to the randomness of our own choices: a sort of game of hide-and-seek with the universe at the center of which we are the omniscient viewer.