Artist
Laure Cottin Stefanelli
Laure Cottin Stefanelli is a french visual artist and a filmmaker. Through her films, photographs and installations, she pursues a research around stories focused on characters inhabited by paradoxical tensions – life, death and erotic impulses – those resulting from the separation between mind and body.
Her work had been exhibited and screened at venues including États Généraux du Film Documentaire (Lussas, FR); KANAL – Centre Pompidou (Brussels, BE); Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival (BR); Kasseler Dok Festival (Kassel, DE); Moscow Biennal (RU); Art Brussels (BE); FIDMarseille (FR) among others. Her first medium-length film 'No blood in my body' received the short film prize at Écrans Documentaires d’Arceuil (FR). Laure Cottin Stefanelli studied literature and cinema at the University of Paris III and graduated in Photo-Video from École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris.
"A strange pleasure emanates from Laure Cottin Stefanelli’s images, a pleasure that stems from the interruption of systems, the suspension of discipline. The characters she portrays often engage in the strictures of self-imposed rigour – marriage, high-level sports, addiction, erotic role play – and her camera emboldens them in their carefully planned choreographies. Not that these choreographies become, as a result, deconstructed or “unmasked”; rather she balances the individuals between desire and ritualised gesture, arresting them in seemingly affective fulfilment. Cottin Stefanelli leaves unsaid what lies outside the frame, where conventions and rules govern the protagonists’ behaviours (...). What remains in the frame, cropped out of context, ends up looking solitary, but also confident – one dares say beautiful. (...)" Antony Hudek on Centauresse
Centauresse
Featuring: Camille, artist Tramaine de Senna, performer Xenia Taniko
The departure point of this work was my niece, Camille, I photographed her from her late childhood until her early teens, in a moment of latency and metamorphosis. She has an androgynous name and has a certain violent and brutal way of being in the world, due to an eagerness and a whole sense of self which is typical of childhood.
Next to Camille’s photographs, other women are represented: the Centauresses. They would have the lower body of a horse and the upper body of a human. They are a representation of a playful femininity, hybrids between humans and animals, between humans and inorganic objects. Beyond a topic about identity, adolescence and its rites of passage, this work has a specific interest in intertwined metaphors, wild storytelling, raw fragments of erotic power, as a mean of focusing on the tactile and physical quality of photography.