The context

The Fontbarlettes district is part of the Valence-le-Haut area, known in the 1960s as a coherent project for a new city. But the scheme finally remained unfinished. Noting a stigmatization of the neighbourhood, the patrons wanted to reveal the ways in which the inhabitants have appropriated this constantly changing space, as well as the perceptions of a broader "outside" that could give a different interpretation. The artist has made several trips to Valencia during which she has had several exchanges and filming sessions with local residents, all in the form of a documentary film. If the two media are designed and produced simultaneously, they nevertheless function autonomously.

The commission

Production of a "documentary film", i.e. a complementary film and publication, which can operate autonomously and open up to multiple spaces and temporalities. The film combines different images such as archives, images-texts and staging with the inhabitants. In her practice, Alejandra Riera calls documentary films a singular way not to make films but to "exceed them", i.e. to "think of documentary films as a space to get out of the inadequacy of an era, as an off-field of the film itself which would constitute itself as a document of its time adding to its own space, the more uncertain space of historical, temporal, emotional discontinuities. The publication, for its part, is presented as a report of the survey : it is composed of exchanges with the inhabitants, image boards and footnotes by the artist, engaging a second period of reflection. Thus, throughout the film and the report, in the dialogue of the boards and texts, sounds and images, testimonies, comments and quotations, multiple passages become visible, or probable beyond the separation established between the supposed center and its periphery.

Alejandra Riera

Alejandra Riera, born Argentina, has lived and worked in France since 1989. After training in art and sociology in Buenos Aires, she was part of the 9th session of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. From 1995 to 2005 she worked on a long-term project based on the "reading" of a photograph, its legend and the article calling it together. For this reason, it initiates "Les maquettes-sans-qualité", a space for research and artistic practice that is completely out of step with current events and where multiple voices are invited. Since 2003 she has been conducting an "Investigation on the Outside", the first part of which concerns a work on normality with UEINZZ, a unique theatre group composed of people in psychological suffering, therapists, philosophers, actors.