It’s August. Feel the suffocating heat of the sun penetrating your skin. All around you, an abundance of flesh is spinning. Thousands of men offer up the naked bodies of baby boys to the angelic icon of San Sebastian. Screams, colours, chants and explosions. Money-garlands. Imagine no women except for me. Wait, yes, behind us women are following with devotion, all dressed up in well pressed clothes and their stocking feet. Now, come back here. Imagine how badly I fell in love with this. I desperately want to be part of it. To be there. I wanted to belong. But I know I can’t. And so, I try to capture it on film. I go there and film it every year, over and over, again and again. One day I will tell the story of a poor and sterile man who wants to replace San Sebastian. But more summers will have to pass before our hero appears.

Explosion Ma Baby

In Adoration, made in collaboration with inmates from the Giudecca Island women’s prison in Venice, stories collide with one another. In this “relegated space” that was previously a convent, Pauline Curnier Jardin uses collage in a spirited way to bridge one period to another, and one use to another.

Adoration

The Italian countryside was once full of fireflies, but now the flickering of far-off headlights pepper the fields as johns go hunting for a one-night mate. In the heat of the night, the reflective glow of other bioluminescent bodies returns the magic of twinkling lights to the darkness.

Fireflies

Transcendence and hedonism are two of the inner contradictions we experience in new conceptual constellations in a work dedicated to collective rituals in Europe’s public spaces.