Camera anima
—
2021
VILLA « LE LAC » LE CORBUSIER, LAUSANNE
INSTALLATION
Michel Lorand’s film Camera anima is a slow “zoom” out shot in the dining room of the Villa le Lac. It starts with a close-up of one of the interior walls of the house reflected in the open window, the wall as it was laid out at the time the house was occupied. The slow camera movement ends with the view of the lake and mountains outside through the window. This Camera anima shows an imaginary construction between an image of the past and the layout of the villa today, between an interior image of the past and an exterior landscape of today.
The silent projection of the film is complemented by a large-format print of Erling Mandelmann’s 1964 black-and-white photograph of the wall in the film, taken when Le Corbusier’s mother and brother were living there. The printing of a 45 rpm vinyl based on the sound of the lake’s water (ebb and flow) concludes this installation in reference to Albert Jeanneret, musician and brother of Le Corbusier.
How do we tell the time? How do we relate a past moment in the present when very quickly we no longer know exactly to what time it belongs?
‘Past events are all contemporary with the strange otherness that lives there. The past is an immense body of which the present is the eye. This body dreams. The voice has abandoned it.’, as Pascal Quignard tells us.
