Boris Labbé
Trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and then at the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême, the work of Boris Labbé (1987, FR) quickly made the rounds of contemporary art exhibitions, international film festivals or audiovisual concerts. His latest short film La Chute was included in the selection of the special session of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week. In 2020, he collaborated with choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and designed the video set design for 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 that develops around references from Japanese art history and literature (The Fukinuki Yatai, The Tale of Genji, The Notes of Chevets) and unfolds as a large sensory fresco with strong emotional potential. A heterogeneous set of drawn, animated and sound scenes are taken from digital material; they recreate a kind of subjective world (inner and outer) in the form of a labyrinth composed 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 for things’ or ‘sensitivity for the ephemeral’. The virtual wandering space allows us to access different scenes based on the randomness of our choices: a kind of hide-and-seek game with the universe at the centre of which we are the omniscient spectator.