Joël Bartoloméo
Lives and works in Berlin.
Joël Bartoloméo was born in 1957. In the 1990’s, he plays the amateur anthropologist by making short sequences taken on the spot as close as possible to his family life. His work explores the representation of intimacy as it appears in « family films », before gradually evolving towards self-portraits.
In 2000, he began working on the current events through images press reviews that he relates to the intimacy of his dreams’ notebooks. Anecdotes, like the images produced by armed conflicts, are intertwined with a narrative always held in the first person, coiling or erasing identities.
In 2006, he started a video project around the self-portrait, which he presented at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2008. In 2009, he was invited to a residency in a psychiatric hospital in Dunkirk, where he worked with the patients and tried to restore the weight of childhood images that haunt them. In 2012, at the Musée d’Art Moderne, he revisited the world of home movies in a broader context by integrating photos borrowed from other families. In 2015, he moved to a room in the castle of Alden Biesen (Belgium) where he intertwined the desired world of childhood and the imaginary. The same year in Sainte Croix en Jarrez (France), he tried to spatially install a book of photos taken in 2004 during a trip to Naples in which fiction seems more powerful than reality and insinuates itself between the wefts of memory.
In 2016, he participates in the 17th edition of the Documentary Month in Roubaix with his film « Journal du dedans et du dehors #12345”, an unedited video that weaves a strange mental patchwork of an inner geography where each new scene arrives as an event. He also shows his sometimes-disturbing dream notebooks, without concession, sometimes funny, sometimes strange, a 320 pages book of drawings declining all the facets that a man can discover of himself.
In 2018 he finishes the film « Journal d’un indécis » (57mn) which tries to account a love situation through different prisms and on different modes. Conversations, confidences, diaries, reflections, life stories, fiction and staging, statements of difficulties…
