"Entretiens sur l'art" with Alain Guiraudie
Entrusted since 2021 to critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the ‘Entretiens sur l'art’ (Interviews about Art) series, which for over 20 years has built up a formidable collection of artists' words, will from now on be looking closely at the materiality and conditions of emergence of the works of the guest artists.
Cinema, writing, photography. Alain Guiraudie has always moved fluidly between different artistic practices. He wrote his first novels as early as the 1980s (though he would not publish the first one, Ici commence la nuit, until 2014, with P.O.L). His first short film, Les Héros sont immortels, was released in 1990. It was followed by several medium-length films and then feature films—seven in total—including the most recent, Miséricorde, which came out in the autumn of 2024.
His distinctive fictional world freely plays with cinematic genres (fantasy, mythology, science fiction, ultra-realism, social critique, comedy, film noir...) and unfolds within a France rarely depicted on screen. The portrayal of small rural homosexual communities, the understated lives of farmers and workers, the “empty diagonal” and peri‑urban zones, ordinary bodies deemed non-standard, or even intergenerational sexuality forms a true political project that leans toward utopia and informs his entire cinema, as well as his broader visual and literary work.
In 2018, while he was a guest artist at the École du Fresnoy in Tourcoing, Alain Guiraudie returned to photography, reconnecting with analog techniques he had practiced in his youth, when he developed his own prints. After cinemas, cinematheques, bookstores, and poetry houses, his work thus began to make inroads into a new sphere: contemporary art.
His photographs are taken during urban wanderings. He stops, watching attentively. He waits for something to happen, photographing passersby with whom he exchanges a few words and sometimes continues the session. They are, he says, “genre scenes that happened all by themselves.”
What place does photography now occupy within the filmmaker’s creative constellation? And literature? While each practice has its own autonomy, clear echoes can be observed between text and image—adaptations, circulations. And, of course, the same freedom and the same defense of imagination’s power. The conversation will thus explore how these different modes of working take shape in their specificity, but also how they intersect and nourish one another.
