Private Project

Blind Alleys as Ocular Ex Voto

In the impassive labyrinth of a historical museum, which seems to have lost its chronology, paranoia is growing out of an unsurpassable contradiction: a moving present has to keep frozen a past that would rather escape. A turtle, like a prehistorical silence, almost takes on the role of a museum object, dismantling both the historical and filmic narrative.

  • Gaëlle Cognée
    Director
  • Academy of Film and Multimedia Marubi
    Technical Support
  • National Historical Museum in Tirana
    Location
  • Minister of Culture in Albania
    Permission
  • Erjona Hanku
    Voice-over
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    15 minutes 58 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    December 15, 2016
  • Country of Origin:
    France
  • Country of Filming:
    Albania
  • Language:
    Albanian, English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Gaëlle Cognée

Gaëlle Cognée (France, 1988) graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy in 2013. During her studies she initiated the collective project Plafond which aimed to exhibit outside of the common white cube in a site-specific approach. Plafond is now composed of six artists and had exhibited in an old factory in Botz-en-Mauges ("Plafond I and II"), in the artist-run space Der Kanal in Berlin ("Muskel") and in different highschools in Paris, Dornes and Decize ("Les Méprises" and "Paysage pour un pickpocket"). During this past year, Gaëlle Cognée spent four months in Tirana and one month in Tangier as part of collaborative residency projects. She will be exhibiting her work at the artist-run space Pauline Perplexe (Arcueil, France) in March 2017.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Through a search for characters she wonders how much stories and history interact, and tries to invent a new organisation for the narrative in order to go over a problem of linearity.
A displacement is often the start for a new project —as part of an art practice dealing mainly with video —, travelling to places derived from a utopian imaginary torn between the eldorado’s promise and the home nostalgia, considering the elsewhere without exoticism.
What is left to the spectator from Cognée’s work, whether it is a film, an installation or a performance, is a long lasting mystery for not being able to distinguish ourselves and our archive as we are immersed in a fog of non linear sequences made of her precise and eloquently made images, perceptions and narratives.