Clara Alloing
Switzerland | 2022 | 44 min
World premiere
Language : French
Subtitle : English
A zany invitation to the workshop of the Swiss performance artist Johanna Monnier, who practices a form of therapeutic sculpture, using art to heal secret wounds. The film resembles a journey blending provocative poetry with eccentric mischief. It is a portrait of great sensitivity, stimulated by melancholic questions.
In a village between France and Switzerland, the artist Johanna Monnier meanders mischievously between emotions and inspirations. The director Clara Alloing delicately captures an artist at work in her studio: her movements with peculiar objects – whimsical extensions of the human body – and also her changeable thoughts, conveyed by a poetic text, dictated in voice-over, like an unabating introspective journey. This film overflows from all sides, like the red nail varnish that brushes across the nails before spreading onto the hand. There is the notion that artistic creativity has no boundary. The images shot on film, like an artisanal gesture, in coloured grain and with an empyrean rhythm, extend this eccentric manual aspect. Johanna Monnier also creates performative sculptures, and the director stages these living tableaux like sequences of baroque reveries, bordering on disturbing hallucinations. The sculptures (hot water bottles) can also heal hidden wounds and inner torments. The works of art create a bond, with cords drawn straight out of the organic and unusual filmmaking of Cronenberg, and soothe gloomy moods.
William Le Personnic
