Launched in 2015 during their studies at Le Fresnoy, Catharsis is basically an itinerant curatorial project led by Noé Grenier, Gilles Ribero and Gwendal Sartre. It was born out of the desire to organize one-off screenings, to put together programs of film and video pieces around their own work, by seizing and developing a recurring theme in their practice, that of catharsis. It is on this point of primordial friction between drive and formulation that the project extends into the creation of collective pieces, with the aim of highlighting what makes all the complexity and the necessity of the dialogue between the image and the forces that work it.
At each of its occurrences, Catharsis seeks to develop a unique approach to this dialogue. It may be the attraction of the performed gesture, where the notion of displacement underlies the entire programming, with the same intention of making the act of filming a gesture constituting the anchoring of the body to the world. It can be the notion of silence, the one that takes place when the image and the filmed body are kneaded by the accident, by this violence of a decisive chance where the logic of entrenchment directs attention away from the visible. It can also be the relation of the image to the music, with this central question of how to film music, and its corollary (how music makes an image), by the impact it has on the body, the camera and the editing.
Depending on the places where the events take place, which are not all places dedicated to cinema, the project employs the projection screen in different ways by allowing forays outside its strict framework. Sometimes by opening up the question of the place to the spectator and that of the fragile status of the images according to how they are shown. Sometimes their central role is taken away, by spreading the images in space, affirming the interest of the project for this tipping point rich in meaning that is the projection / installation relationship. That is to say a way of always digging deeper into the potentialities of catharsis, of confrontation and of solution that the images carry within them.
