Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo

ÆQUO, 2023

20'23, film

Production: Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains

An Alpine horn makes the mountains vibrate. Glaciers drip.
Far away, on an oceanographic vessel, researchers probe the seabed. Geological bodies of salt and ice emerge from the digital depths of software. They melt and disintegrate in the hands of scientists.

This short film is conceived as a dialogue between the Alpine glaciers and the underwater relief of the Mediterranean Sea, through a play of complementarities and reversals between the source of the river and the sea where it flows.

Hands manipulate interlocking shapes of ice and salt. They resemble pieces of rock, models of mountain reliefs. The film's setting expands: we find ourselves aboard a scientific ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. Geologists send sound waves of different frequencies into the water at regular intervals. They enter the heart of the oceans' geological memory. The film plunges into the digital underwater landscapes reconstructed using this 3D seismic technique. Sound impulses guide the journey.

Thousands of miles away, Alpine glaciers drip. The sounds of alpine horns thrill the surrounding snow-capped mountains. These landscapes filmed on film mingle with digital underwater landscapes: several thousand years ago, a proto-ocean existed here. It opened up. Then the European plate sank beneath the Adriatic plate, and the Alpine ocean closed in. As the voices of geologists content this morphogenesis, the ice melts and the salt disintegrates in their hands.

Partnerships: Sorbonne University [ Direction Science, culture et société; Laboratoire Paleo-climate and Basins | UPMC - Institut des Sciences de la Terre de Paris; Laboratoire Géosciences Océan | UBO, Brest; Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche | Institut de la Mer de Villefranche]; French Ocean Fleet operated by Ifremer; Eliis, publisher of seismic interpretation software; Festival Ovni and Hôtel Windsor, Nice; La HEAD, Département Cinéma | Option Son, Genève

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With :

Jean-Philippe Adam, François Baudin, Madjid Bouayard-Agha, Matthieu Bressac, Patrick Costagutto, Charline Dally, Leila Gharbi, Stéphanie Girardclos, Melek Golbol, Christian Gorini, Carla Larvor, Camille Le Piver, Quentin L'helgoualc'h, Ambre Miserey, Luc Moreau, Dia Ninkabou, Nicolas Perrillat, Louis Petiteau, Jules Ramage, Emilie Riquier, Jean-Baptiste Rohou, Claudio Rosenberg, Clément Schneider, Paco Stil, Lucas Tortarolo.

Director of photography: Aurore Toulon, Victor Zébo

Camera assistant: Lucas Plançon

Music: Martin Balmand

Sound recording: Christine Dancausse, Louis Lamarche

Paleoscan images: Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo, Lucas Tortarolo

Paleoscan technical support: Jean-Philippe Adam

3D technical support: Alexandre Peschmann, Thibaut William, Cyprien Quairiat

Editing: Julia Borderie & Eloïse Le Gallo with Laura Rius Aran

Sound editing: Benjamin Poilane, Mondine Ondin

Calibration: Aurore Toulon

Mixing: Yannick Delmaire, Blandine Tourneux

Recorder : Tom Nollet

Graphics: Margot Duvivier

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Geobodies, 2025

installation of pendulum sculptures in salt, ice, metals, silicone molds, variable dimensions

The character-sculptures from the film Æquo are exhibited here for the first time as an installation, in resonance with the context of the town of Sion, close to the Valais glaciers and the Bex salt mine. These forms have been generated by scientific tools for artistic purposes: to give substance to the scientific data, the artists have extracted several geological bodies in 3D from the Paleoscan software. This geological software compiles and processes the sound signals sent to probe the seabed to create 3D imagery. The initial sound signal was then transposed from one language to another, and printed by a 3D printer to give birth to these ice and salt forms. Complementary, they are destined to metamorphose and disappear on contact with each other: becoming ocean and becoming glacier, intimately intertwined. This ephemeral sculptural gesture, like a tool for new hypotheses, materializes a world in transition. These forms attempt to freeze time for as long as they can, in the current context of climate emergency, where the machine is both a vector of vision and of loss.

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Impressions of the Valais, 2025

16mm film

Like a return to the roots of the Æquo project, which was originally filmed in Valais, the artists propose an experimental stroll filmed with a 16mm Bolex camera, between the Ferpècle glacier, the Bex salt mine and the underground lake of Saint Léonard. Cetacean songs, recorded by bioacoustician Olivier Adam, with whom the artists collaborate, emerge like cryptic messages from ancient times. They remind us of the marine origins of Alpine sedimentary rocks. Like a score, the strata release a mysterious, watery music, performed and diverted by musician Martin Balmand in the underground lake of Saint Léonard during the filming. The songs of our sea cousins resonate with the acoustics of the site.

Production: Biennale Son

Partnerships: Saint Léonard underground lake, Bex salt mines

Many thanks for their support, patience and expertise to : Olivier Adam, Nathan Casso, Jasmine Giller and Cédric Savioz.

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Production, photography, editing: Eloïse Le Gallo & Julia Borderie

Music: Martin Balmand

Cetacean sounds: Olivier Adam

Cetaceans: Bowhead whales, pilot whales, humpback whales, killer whales, sperm whales

Calibration: Jérôme Cortie

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Julia Borderie and Eloïse Le Gallo

Born in 1989
Based in Paris

A duo of French artist-directors, Eloïse Le Gallo & Julia Borderie make the experience of otherness a condition of artistic creation. Since 2016, in an exploratory mode, they have been working together to explore the profound interaction that water has with the territories it bathes, from source to ocean, tracing the genesis of the beings who live there and the geological origin of the materials in the landscape. In a poetic documentary approach, the camera's eye acts as a catalyst for encounters, while questioning the human gestures that shape materials and territories. At the heart of a mesh of viewpoints and disciplines (craft techniques, geology, chemistry, marine biology, etc.) their work develops at the crossroads of sculpture and cinema. Recently, their research has led them to examine more specifically the complementarities between learned form and sensitive form, in collaborations with scientists around forms generated by their cutting-edge technological tools. 

Developing their projects during residencies, they show their films at numerous international festivals (Winterthur, Festival du nouveau cinéma de Montréal, Vidéoformes, Festival dei Popoli, Ovni) and take part in group and solo exhibitions (MAC VAL (2024), Crédac (2024),

Maison des arts de Grand Quevilly (2024), La Maréchalerie - center d'art contemporain de l'ENSA Versailles (2022), Cac La Traverse Alfortville (2021), Gac Annonay (2020), Galerie/Espace d'art contemporain du théâtre de Privas (2018, France), Venice Architecture Biennale (2018).