Stella

“It’s winter under the heavy sky, the sea has retreated and the wind draws lines of sand on the asphalt roads of Stella, a seaside town in Northern France; it appears soundless and deserted. In the deep night [in the deep of the night], the horizon moves at the pace of the dunes, one by one they engulf the steep plan of the city. In front of this swaying landscape, hands are putting together a heap of documents, collecting and sorting them—drawings, samples, scans of landscapes, thermographic—thus elaborating a manifold, experimental cartography of the city, erecting Stella in a milieu where the relationship between the instability of earthly matter and the authority of geometry becomes graspable. Waiving the traditional opposition between nature and architecture, Stella is a film about work as a necessary condition for perception, in which Elsa Brès teaches us how to look at a mutating space. The inside is the place from which we, as would an explorer, a traveler-botanist, an archivist or an archaeologist, reassemble in a constellation the elements that represent and compose the exterior space, from old, framed estate agency views to measures, geological samples and the like. The outdoor space then appears as a collage of forms and stuff, constantly interpenetrating each other. When the maquette literally melts down on the city maps, a movement of fusion irreversibly blurs the distinction between the building from which the work organizes itself and the surrounding sea of dunes: the buildings are worn away, the landscape is an architecture.” Charlotte Bayer-Broc”