Elsa Brès
Elsa Brès is an artist and filmmaker. She graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains and the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture.
She is active within the Elinka Films production collective, the Coudoulous Cinéma venue, and the Forêts Queer film programming initiative.Her films and installations focus on forces of resistance in marginal, peripheral, or underground spaces. Blending long research periods with narrative form experimentation, her projects are rooted in specific places to which she is connected, and she adopts a collaborative approach. After creating three films that offer alternative narratives centered on water-related infrastructures (Stella50.4N1.5E – 2016, 15 min; Love Canal – 2017, 17 min; Sweat – 2020, 30 min), she directed Les Sanglières, a feature film set in the rural French region where she lives. The film explores the history of private property and the figure of the wild boar. This long-term project has also led to several installations. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at La Loge Brussels (Connivéncia, 2023), Château d’Assas (Every peak is a crater, 2023), and State of Concept Athens (Notes for les Sanglières, 2022). Her recent group exhibitions and screenings include Radius CCA Delft, Cinéma du Réel, IndieLisboa, La Capella, Spore Initiative Berlin, transmediale, Vdrome, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, MO.CO Panacée, FID Marseille, CRAC Occitanie, LOOP Barcelona, and Palais de Tokyo, among others. She was awarded the Sciences Po Prize for Contemporary Art in 2024.