Camille Llobet

Moraine, 2025

4K video, 12'04

Sarah and Laurent, mountain guides, are scrabbling around the moraines of the Mer de glace, a famous glacier in the Mont Blanc massif.

Named in the late 19th century by a British explorer for its similarity to "a lake shaken by a strong breeze and suddenly frozen "¹, the Mer de Glace today is a gaping hollow, the imprint of its vanished ice ^mass2, giving way to a moraine amphitheater. From the Savoyard patois morena meaning "bulge of earth", moraines are rocky debris carried along by the movement of the glacier. They accumulate to form heterogeneous beads of clay, silt, sand, pebbles and boulders up to the size of a house, gradually covering the seracs (blocks of ice) and crevasses (deep cracks created
by the breaking of moving ice). Before reaching the rock faces, the mountain guides cross these gigantic strings of unstable, shifting and unpredictable hills.

This filmed research attempts to capture the ^{proprioceptive3} personalities of the two protagonists and reveal the environment through their gestures. Climbing steep slopes and narrow ridges, and descending unstable terrain on a daily basis, transform the body and imprint themselves on the joints. Where an inexperienced walker struggles to find his way without falling or destabilizing the ground under the weight of his steps, Sarah and Laurent dance with the void, the verticality and instability of the ground, on the lookout for what all their sensations indicate. The eyes locate possible areas where to place the feet, while the legs regulate the support and speed of each step, and the arms ensure balance. You need to seek out a certain speed to touch the ground, let a step slide when surprised by a collapse, change your point of support if a block topples over, and always be ready to jump to the side if the surface turns out to be more dangerous than expected. The image, determined by these sensations, attempts to capture this choreography. The sound materializes this moving environment: flows, cracks and collapses inhabit the glacial valley that has become a sounding board.

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¹ William Windham and Pierre Martel, Relations de leurs deux voyages aux glaciers de Chamonix (1741-1742), p. 28-29, Geneva, 1879.
2 Since 1830, it has lost 2.5 km in length and more than 150 m in thickness.
3 Man's perception of his own body, through kinaesthetic (movement) and postural sensations in relation to the body's situation in relation to the intensity of the earth's attraction.

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WITH Laurent Bibollet, Sarah Blanc
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DIRECTOR, EDITOR Camille Llobet
IMAGE Antonin Claude
SOUND Corentin Vigot, Camille Llobet
ASSISTANTS ARTISTIC RESEARCH Naïs Charlery, Lou Lombard
SETTING AND EDITING LOOK Ariane Boukerche
SOUND MIXING Corentin Vigot, Kerwin Rolland
GRAPHICS Huz & Bosshard
SCIENTIFIC ADVICE Ludovic Ravanel
PRODUCTION Camille Llobet

WITH THE SUPPORT OF Centre national des arts plastiques, Biennale Son (CH), Fondation de la Compagnie du Mont Blanc, Kraft Production

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LE BRUIT DE LA LANGUE, 2022

Performance, approx. 15 minutes
Grand Théâtre de Genève, Saturday, February 1, 2025, 8 p.m.

Invited by Art Genève Musique, Biennale Son presented Le bruit de la langue, a performance by Camille Llobet, as part of WOLFTONE ASSOCIATES (or LES ASSOCIÉS DU SON LOUP), a new series of performances and musical installations at Geneva's Grand Théâtre.

This performance is an extension of an ongoing reflection on the meaning of the sound of oral language. When we speak, the words expressed sometimes have less meaning than the sound of the voice, which speeds up, slows down, reproduces the intonation of the speaker, stops abruptly, presses on a syllable or softens.

Headphones on, face to face, eyes closed, Camille Llobet and Magali Léger listen over and over again to a series of significant, extremely short extracts from one of their previously recorded conversations. Live, with their mouths, they reproduce the sounds of each other's words, in the manner of a child experimenting with the contours of the tongue. This fascination with noise is perhaps linked to the child's primitive experience. He discovers his environment by touching it, and reproduces the sound of his gestures with his mouth. He plays with the possibilities of his phonatory apparatus and the resonance of his voice in space. Little by little, mouth sounds are transformed into a series of syllables and become language.

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Camille Llobet

Born in 1982 in Bonneville (FR)
Based in Sallanches

Visual artist and director Camille Llobet is a graduate of the École supérieure d'art Annecy Alpes (2007). She has participated́ in the Salon de Montrouge in 2016 and in numerous group exhibitions such as Les Nouvelles Babylones (Centre d'art contemporain, Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2013), Silences (Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, 2019), Oral Text (Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2022) and L'Art d'apprendre. Une école des créateurs (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022). She has had́ several solo exhibitions such as Second (Centre d'art de Vénissieux, 2014), Majelich (Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, 2018) Idiolecte (Galerie Florence Loewy, Paris, 2019). His works are part of French public collections including that of FRAC Sud, FRAC-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, FRAC Grand Large - Hauts-de-France, Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes and Fond d'art contemporain - Paris Collection.

In 2023, Camille Llobet presents a first major monographic exhibition at the Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes entitled Fond d'air. She also finalizes a first medium-length documentary essay, Pacheû̂ (2023), selected́ at FID Marseille in French competition and first film competition. She is currently working on a new photographic, video and sound project entitled Moraine, which will be presented at the next edition of the Son Biennale in 2025 (Valais, Switzerland). She is also writing and directing a new feature-length documentary essay on high-mountain workers entitled Monstre pentes, produced by the Société des Apaches.

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Each work begins with an encounter and a questioning process to be experimented with together. I begin by imagining precise filming devices that take the filmed experience as their starting point, and then create video and sound edits that are both intuitive and aim for formal radicalism. Drawings, scores and performances often follow on from the issues raised in the videos.

After exploring orality, movement and human perception as research territories during studio shoots, I moved́ my working protocols to the high mountains. This complex environment made up of rock, snow and ice is today undergoing mutation. A brutal transformation due to accelerating ice melt and rock collapses that places a geological time at the level of that of a human lifetime. This Pacheû (2020-2023) project has taken the form of sound installations and a first medium-length essay in which narration is achieved as much through noise and gesture as through voice and image. It opens up a new field of experimentation and formats by situating the human in an environment.

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Magali Léger

Magali Léger, French soprano, trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and began a career acclaimed for her vocal and stage qualities, enriched by training in dance and theater. Unanimously awarded first prize and nominated at the Victoires de la Musique awards in 2003, she performs on prestigious stages in France and abroad, exploring a varied repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary.

She has collaborated with the likes of William Christie, Emmanuelle Haïm and Laurent Pelly, performing works by Offenbach, Mozart, Massenet and Bizet, as well as modern creations such as Michaël Levinas' La Métamorphose. She is also active in baroque music with her Rosasolis ensemble, having recorded several discs, and participates in eclectic projects such as Mars-2037, a musical comedy.