LE BAL, in Paris, presents Braguino or the Impossible Community, the project of Clément Cogitore, first winner of the LE BAL Award for Young Creation with the ADAGP.
Clément Cogitore travelled to Braguino twice (in 2012 and 2016), “Braguine’s place” in Russian, taken from the last name of the family living in a few lost log cabins deep in the Siberian Taiga, 700 km from the nearest village. He wanted to unravel the mystery of the determination of one man, Sacha, coming from a community of “Old Believers”. Over thirty years ago, he decided to move his family there, with the hope of living in peace and creating a completely self-sufficient way of life. Quite rapidly, however, this paradise became the scene of an open conflict between two families not able to live together. This impossible community composes the central axis of the cinematic, photographic, and sound work of Clément Cogitore.
Léa Bismuth: We are facing two parts here: a film and an installation. How does one go from one space to the other?
Clément Cogitore: At the very beginning, I hadn’t yet imagined a film. I wanted to remind make a report of what had astonished me in 2012. I wanted to narrate the state of a civilization in communion with nature, with which I seemed to deeply connect, and question the utopia at the heart of any community’s beginning. The core of this project came about when I realized that this territory, which seemed like a paradise at first, was tearing apart two enemy families. So, the project leaned toward the failure of the utopia and the impossible community. With his way of living fluidly with the forest, preserving resources at any cost, and putting the principles of an autonomic education into practice, Sacha Braguine had succeeded in constructing a utopia. It worked at first, but, rapidly, the impossibility of sharing this ideal emerged, the impossibility of integrating with the other. The trigger was when Sacha’s wife’s sister moved to the same place with her own family. A powerful conflict began to ferment. It was like Cain and Abel, or a neighbors’ quarrel over a banal tragedy, but here it lead to two irreconcilable tales and ideologies. Through this conflict, I also wanted to talk about the paranoia of the human spirit fed by isolation, how the other becomes the enemy and the medium for all projections of evil. However, only filming the conflict from one side is inherently very limiting in terms of dramaturgy, so I considered another way to tell the story with a more fragmented narration in the exhibition. To me, the film is structured around a character caught in a web of problems which he must get through, step by step, to leave transformed. It is this minimal framework specific to a very archaic dramaturgy that interests me.
Léa Bismuth: Are we talking about a terrible fable?
Clément Cogiter: I’d prefer to say a tale, a cruel tale, to the extent that in the tale, there is no lesson nor a moral. The tale is about how human beings adapt to monsters and danger… In my work, I am constantly connected to very old tales, and here, more precisely, I would say parables. My few characters become a summery of humanity, and the surrounding forest becomes the entire world they confront, symptomatic of the inevitable march of our time. The menace is universal. Braguino is the study of a microcosm revealing a tipping moment of our civilization.
Léa Bismuth is a curator of photographic exhibitions. She lives and works in Paris. This interview is taken from a conversation between Léa Bismuth and Clément Cogitore published in Clément Cogitore, Braguino or the Impossible Community, co-edited by Filigranes Éditions and LE BAL for the exhibition.
Clément Cogitore, Braguino or the Impossible Community
From September 15 through December 23, 2017
Le Bal
6 Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
Book published by Filigranes Éditions, co-edited with Le Bal.
Graphics by José Albergaria and Rick Bas Backer
35€
