ROMANTICIST LANDSCAPE 
mono-canal video with stereo soundtrack, 7'09
music : Serenade by Franz Schubert played by Otto Mesloh, 1897
with Lili Mamath
directed by Samuel Racine

production : collectif Fossile

piece exhibited at Thomas Henry Museum in Normandy, Cherbourg city, in 2012


… j'ai recherché avec une sensibilité exquise la vue des beaux paysages : c'est pour cela uniquement que j'ai voyagé.
Les paysages étaient comme un archet qui jouait sur mon âme...
                                                                                                                                                                             Stendhal, Vie de Henry Brulard



"Romanticist landscape" is a video work by collectif Fossile designed to dialogue with a certain visual art movement of the nineteenth century wich is well examplified by Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818). Historical romanticist landscapes, whether they include a contemplating character or not, can be considered a manifestation of the soul's fusion in the universe through a vision centered on an individual.

This video shot in a studio shows a woman whose emotional condition goes slowly from tears to laughters. The wind in her hair, the fixed direction of her gaze prompt us to read this portrait as the complement of a missing landscape. The sequence, which is repeated and reversed, is mixed with a 1897 interpretation by Otto Mesloh of Franz Schubert's "Serenade", both touching and dissonant. This work proposes a somewhat distanced point of view on the pathetic treatment of landscape and the vision of the world it figures.