Degree zero | Tandem | Films

In the heart of a forest, Enzo Mianes draws inspiration from heterogeneous materials which he collects to serve his archaeological vision of emotions.

About

Synopsis

In the heart of a forest, Enzo Mianes draws inspiration from heterogeneous materials which he collects to serve his archaeological vision of emotions.Somewhere between abandonment and temporal acceleration, he sets out to restore life to humans and to things by turning his discoveries into works of art.

The artist

Enzo Mianes was born in 1988 in Toulouse, France. He lives and works in Paris and in the Perche region. He is represented by the Mor & Charpentier gallery, Paris.

Technical data

Director	Daniel Ablin
Cinematographer	Eric Genillier
Music Composer	Option Géniale
Duration	05:22

Chronicle

Submerged Worlds

“ Objects live longer,
Objects live longer,
Than pe-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ople.
Not always obviously.
But often objects live longer than people. ”
Objects – Philippe Katerine.

What a divine achievement it is to disappear. But then we would have to disappear without leaving anything behind, nothing to show that we were ever on Earth. Here we are then, since we are not God but mere mortals, condemned to scatter memories, remnants and relics in our wake, in spite of ourselves; residues of human presence that linger on in all memories, individual or collective, happy or painful. Fragments of life, repressed by time. Enzo Mianes gathers these fragments as he roams, taking care to dwell on their banality. Back in his studio, he classifies and sorts them with all the fastidiousness of an archaeological ragpicker, before combining them into fetishes of memory as inspiration takes him.

To achieve true anamnesis, we need to invoke worlds that have sunk into oblivion. Through storytelling, Enzo Mianes breathes a new, vital force into raw, inorganic materials that have fallen into disrepute. His resulting works are like myths, mutely recounting a paradoxical encounter: that of presence and absence, intimacy and communality, love and death. Like the work Les Amants, in which a candle, lit at both ends, swings like a pendulum to the rhythm of falling wax. Lovers famously burn the candle at both ends, but neither of them know when the flame will flicker out. A celebration of a fiery passion as much as a chronicle of its foretold end, the work takes on the aspect of an altar dedicated to romantic love, both to its power and its fragility.

For Enzo Mianes, symbolic values and emotional intensity propel the ephemeral into the absolute. This makes his process more akin to a cathartic journey, where cobbled-together animism is substituted for shock therapy, where abandonment turns out to be the start of a possible reconstruction rather than an eternal separation. After all, "nothing of what is born dies, but one thing separated from one part and added to another produces different forms”, as the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras put it. Daniel Ablin, Eric Genillier and Simon le Berre have borrowed from this magical vision of the world – a world of infinite bric-a-brac, chaotic and precarious – to offer a ceremony on tape for the emotions that Enzo Mianes’ work arouses.

Thomas Bernard

Thomas Bernard was born in Libourne in 1980. Art columnist for Fluide Glacial, he is also exhibition curator for La Véranda and artistic co-director for Ferraille Productions of the Formula Bula festival, comics and more.