Boris Labbé, Sirki, A Collection of 4 films, each around 2 mins in length. Courtesy of the artist.
"The Ainu people constitute an indigenous population of Hokkaido, Northeast of Honshu, Sakhalin, Kuril Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. KAPARAMIP, CICIRI, TETARAPE and RUUNPE refer to different types of kimonos and patterns made by Ainu creators. Patterns are designed, according to the different regions and families, with shaped cut-out clothes, white or colored, and embroideries. These patterns might be inspired by forms from nature, connected to the Ainu daily life and their spirituality. The four animations are a tribute to this art, giving life to elementary forms that evolve infinitely by repetition, dancing in rhythm with the traditional Ainu music Ukouk.
"Sirki" means "pattern" in the Ainu language.
The project consists of a collection of four films around 2 mins in length. The titles are Kaparamip, Ruunpe, Tetarape and Cicir.
Boris Labbé, Sirki, A Collection of 4 films, each around 2 mins in length. Courtesy of the artist.
"The Ainu people constitute an indigenous population of Hokkaido, Northeast of Honshu, Sakhalin, Kuril Islands and Kamchatka Peninsula. KAPARAMIP, CICIRI, TETARAPE and RUUNPE refer to different types of kimonos and patterns made by Ainu creators. Patterns are designed, according to the different regions and families, with shaped cut-out clothes, white or colored, and embroideries. These patterns might be inspired by forms from nature, connected to the Ainu daily life and their spirituality. The four animations are a tribute to this art, giving life to elementary forms that evolve infinitely by repetition, dancing in rhythm with the traditional Ainu music Ukouk.
"Sirki" means "pattern" in the Ainu language.
The project consists of a collection of four films around 2 mins in length. The titles are Kaparamip, Ruunpe, Tetarape and Cicir.
Based on his drawing activity, Boris Labbé's work is characterized by hybridization, combining the use of digital moving image techniques with those specific to animated film. This approach, somewhere between tradition and innovation, forms an original and vibrant language, prone to improvisation and the calculation of probabilities, questioning the problems of representation, the relationship between painting and cinema, between music and dance, between the body and animals, plants and minerals.
His videos tend to break out of the spatio-temporal framework imposed by classical cinema; governed by the notion of expanded cinema, his works are not only destined for projection in the movie theater, but also tend towards other forms, notably installations. Boris Labbé creates a cinema without direct shooting, without actors, without characters, without dialogue, and whose narration, often dilated, remains open to the spectator’s interpretation. This apparent minimalism paves the way to maximums, with each project seeking its culmination until a certain form of depletion of the cinematic means deployed.
Boris Labbé’s work forms a cinema of multiplicity. Repetition, re-presentation, collages, patterns, metamorphoses, perpetual movement, as well as constant citations of art history, literature and philosophy, have all become essential resources of his audiovisual language. The emblem of all his videos is palingenesis, a notion that calls for both looping and regeneration: cyclical return of the same events; regular reappearance of ancestral characteristics; eternal return to life.