Carole Douillard is a visual artist and performer. She has been working for many years on the question of the body and gesture. Through her own presence or those of other performers, she questions the position of the spectator, shifting the one who usually looks, and who then becomes looked at.
Born in Nantes in 1971 to a French father and a Kabyle mother, in 2013 she initiated a trilogy around the city of Algiers, of which the film Idir (2018) is the third part. For the latter, Carole Douillard looks at the city as a public space that women and men experience differently. While women pass through it, men occupy it and form static groups.
Carole Douillard has presented her performances in major institutions in France and abroad: Centre Pompidou (Paris), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Fondation d'entreprise Ricard (Paris), Frac des Pays de la Loire (Carquefou), Mac Val (Vitry-sur-Seine), Bergen Kunsthall (Norway), ca2m (Madrid), Wiels (Brussels). She took part in the Lyon Biennial in 2017 and the Oslo Biennial (2019-2024).
Following in the footsteps of Bruce Nauman's 1967 performance Walking In an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, in which the artist is observed walking in his studio along the white lines of a square drawn on the floor, Carole Douillard asked Idir, a young man from Algiers, to re-enact this performance in three emblematic sites in the city of Algiers: Bab El Oued, Diar Es Saâda and Les Sablettes. Moving from the private, intimate space of the studio to the public space of the city, the performance, filmed by Franco-American cinematographer Babette Mangolte, reveals the gaze and attitude of passers-by observing this young man with his slow, wiggling step, outside the usual codes of his genre.
The floor of the Chapelle de l'Oratoire, where the film is screened, offers a continuity of the urban ground trodden by Idir, dreamily drawing the viewer into a space between interior and exterior, between Nantes and Algiers.
Babette Mangolte is a Franco-American experimental filmmaker born in 1941, based in New York and San Diego (California). Since the late 1960s, she has collaborated with artists of her generation, filming pioneering performance artists such as Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Marina Abramovic and Yvonne Rainer in their research and exploration of gesture. Her films have been the subject of retrospectives at festivals and museums around the world. She recently had an exhibition at the Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne - Château de Rochechouart.
Created with the support of: FNAGP, Région Pays de la Loire, Ville de Nantes, Institut Français, (Paris), Institut Français (Alger), Drac Pays de la Loire.