Pauline Curnier Jardin: 'This work embodied my desire to make an experimental film in the classic sense of the term'

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Explosion Ma Baby, 2016. 09:12 min., HD video, color, sound

'Solastalgia - Wild Tales' is a program of online screenings selected by Art Basel Film curator Filipa Ramos and presented weekly on artbasel.com. First up is Pauline Curnier Jardin's 2016 Explosion Ma Baby.

Filipa Ramos: Explosion Ma Baby documents a real festivity. In it, money is offered to babies who, in turn, are offered to icon figures of San Sebastian. What was the starting point for this film?

Pauline Curnier Jardin: On a lucky day, I found myself in the middle of a procession where fathers held up their children born that same year to the patron saint of the city. They wore banknotes around their necks to sponsor the following year’s festivity. Women were relegated to the end of the procession, walking in stocking feet. This is how I re-interpreted it: through the naked, screaming bodies of their newborn babies, men transfer money to the ephebe martyr St. Sebastian, creating a spectacular cult of patriarchal power whose protector is a homoerotic figure.

FR: There is an incredible articulation between the images’ pace, the sounds, and the music in Explosion Ma Baby. Why did you want to give the film such a rhythm?

PCJ: This film embodied my desire to make an experimental film in the classic sense of the term (Len Lye being my god!). It relies on very basic sensations: what the eye, stomach, and heart feel, rather than on thoughts. I have been accumulating these images since 2010 so I also became a devotee of this spectacle, going there almost every year to film it. I wanted to make an edit that consisted exclusively of the four motives of desire this procession embodies so well: men, money, babies, and color explosions!

The sound is an arrangement of the local fanfares (which I also recorded each year), the devotees’ incantations, and an original composition by percussionist Benjamin Colin. Vincent Denieul reworked it to be heard very loud, to be viscerally felt, and give viewers the impression of participating in the festivity, sometimes by being the child who cries in the din and sometimes the man who cries to the sky.

FR: As in previous works of yours (I'm thinking particularly of Grotta Profonda), there is here an important connection between faith, spirituality, and the role women play (or don't play). Can you tell us more about this interest of yours?

PCJ: I think these obsessions with faith and spirituality come from their intrinsic form of ecstasy and, of course, from the history of the art they generate. The Catholic culture in Southern Europe (which particularly interests me and where I come from) relies on a hyper-sexualized, almost pornographic, and gore representation, which I associate with both violence and enjoyment, death and life. The cathartic power of these images fascinates me.

Historically, patriarchy is deeply rooted in these foundations of official religion and the organization of its capitalist forms, which seem impossible to eradicate. It is the role played by women, or its absence, that makes me think so. What fascinates me is that at the same time, in the same narrative, religion allows women to escape the social roles assigned to them. Nuns, ecstatics, visionaries… up to the 20th century, these were the only modes in which women from a modest background managed to escape their reproductive function and to mark history with their name, without suffering witch hunt and consequent oblivion. I am thinking of women like Jeanne d’Arc, or Bernadette Soubirous – even though Jeanne d'Arc's end of life was horrifying, and Bernadette Soubirous's very sad.

Pauline Curnier Jardin is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.