Group C - Artist Talk Yaël André

Artist Talk - Yaël André

Yaël André is a media artist and multiple film festival winner from Brussels. She has specialised in producing artistic film projects from found footage, which is mainly in the format of 8mm. Her famous work When I will be dictator deals with topics around death and the coping with it, and is characterised by its partly light and humorous approach of the matter. In her projects she includes both, external and her own footage. She spent about ten years producing her own material and collected that of e.g. her friends as well. The material consists of footage depicting everyday life, in families for example.

André spent about four months on transferring all the material into a digital archive, and another four month watching and sorting the hundreds of hours of footage according to theme (about 60 different). She then used that material to produce her film When I will be dictator, which later had to be re-transferred to HQ in order to be broadcasted. The editing itself took about 1 ½ years, while as the entire production run for about three years. She reflects on the work as a very difficult and elaborate procedure.

For When I will be dictator André was inspired by the death of a friend. It is both, a feature film as well as a documentary. André decided to re-create and re-assign new foley and voices to the videos, as the original sounds of the footage could no longer be used. She tried, however, to apply only little post production in respect to the material. For the shown conversations, she wrote and recorded new dialogs that are – again – humorous but also slightly cynical and critical and that stimulate to think. To her own surprise, the film was a world-wide success. She states that the film mainly about imagination, rather than about the archives.

During the production of the film, André also started a web documentary about her project, which took circa nine months to finish with a team of about ten people from Brussels and France. She labels it as a tribute to the disappearing super 8 film format. This archive enables people to browse through video footage and create personal clips, as if they were real memories.  In fact, André considers the project as an archive of memories, rather than a regular video archive. The fascinating aspect of this project is the re-assigning of meaning to footage that once had ideal and personal value.  People create short films and, in a way, pretend as if the outcome depicted their real memories. The footage on the website differs from the material used in her film though.  People are able to chose among about 400 of the so-called “souvenier scenes”, between 64 minutes of music, and seven mood sounds. She says her project fills “the memories with life” again.