Hugonnier Marine
born in 1969
photographer, director, filmmaker
Marine Hugonnier (b. 1969 in Paris, lives in London/Paris)
Marine Hugonnier works predominantly with film and photography. Her practice is infused by a long standing interest in the anthropology of images (source:http://www.e-flux.com).
Marine Hugonnier's Trilogy is the third installment of Live Cinema, an exhibition series exploring single-channel work at the Museum's Film and Video Gallery. While diverse in subject and approach, these films—Ariana (2003), The Last Tour (2004), and Travelling Amazonia (2006)—engage with what Hugonnier refers to as the "politics of vision": the notion that perception is determined by cultural, political, and actual perspective. To Hugonnier, every vantage point taken in through the camera's lens—from the panorama that derives from militaristic origins, to the tourist site that focuses on highly specific vistas, and the traveling shot that privileges mono-focal perspective and linear time—frames and affects the experience of what is captured on film.
In Ariana, the panoramic view itself becomes an object of desire, as Hugonnier and her film crew search for an elevated perspective into the Panjsher Valley in Afghanistan. After they discover that only Afghani government officials have access to this particular vista, the panorama itself becomes a form of political and militaristic control.
The Last Tour imagines a future deprived of the possibility of experiencing epic images of the landscape, as Hugonnier embarks on a fictive journey through the Matterhorn Mountain to mark its closing to the public. While seemingly dystopian, The Last Tour allows us to realize to what extent tourism determines our perception of the landscape and reality.
Travelling Amazonia trains the lens on the trans-Amazonian highway in Brazil, which was initiated under a dictatorship in the 1970s but never fully completed. Hugonnier's intention to capture a moving image of this unfinished, utopian road runs parallel to her interest in the equally failed nationalistic project that generated it.
source:http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/276.html
