Les voyageurs

Christophe Schaeffer is a French multidisciplinary artist — writer, poet, visual artist, philosopher (PhD), and lighting designer. His career spans theatre, contemporary dance, visual arts, music, and academic research, through a transversal exploration of perception and language. He has published around twenty books (essays, poetry, fiction) and has received international recognition for his work in theatre, particularly as a lighting and stage designer.

Since 2022, he has been developing a body of experimental films in close dialogue with his visual and sonic research. Shot exclusively on mobile phone, his films explore duration, slowness, and the vibration of reality through techniques such as extreme slow motion, long focal lengths, and image superimposition. Some works embrace a radical sonic economy (even silence), while others engage a minimal acoustic writing — or conversely, a sonic saturation where image and sound merge into a unified perceptual field, giving rise to phenomena of synesthesia: sensory drifts in which the boundaries between seeing, hearing, and feeling dissolve, reshaping the experience of reality.

His film Croix de Chavaux received the Best Experimental Film award at the Athens International Monthly Art Film Festival (2025). His films were also presented at the Trente-Trente Festival (Bordeaux, 2024), under the title La doublure du réel. The literary review En attendant Nadeau praised the radical nature of his cinematic gesture, describing him as a “cinégraphic poet.”

Since 2024, he has been an associate artist with the contemporary music ensemble TM+, with whom he creates hybrid works combining experimental cinema and contemporary composition. In 2025, he designed the visual universe of D’une Sérénade l’autre, a piece inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 24 and Nicolas de Staël’s painting Le Concert.

His work unfolds along the thresholds of perception, exploring subtle gestures and sensory memory — a practice that is at once fragile, radical and embodied.