selected works

Selected works by Michèle Saint-Michel. See expanded list

21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body [B-Side] (2024)

Filmmaking is magical because it’s imbued with time, attention, and community. Artists’ film in particular is extraordinary because we often shrug the yoke of expectation in an attempt at expression cut close to the bone.

Working with celluloid film this year has brought a shift in my filmmaking practice toward an embodiment of the moving image. I’ve come to understand the camera not as extractive or as outward piercing, but instead as an envelope. The film camera as divine feminine opens to accept the light of the world before it. This subtle shift in perspective has pulled my filmmaking under the skin. I’ve brought it inside like laundry on the line when it starts to rain: a needful act, necessary, urgent.

This new, hand processed film features my work with 34 London-based artists performing 21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body. It’s superimposed over a single shot of clouds over London in May 2024. The film features a modular score (inspired by William Raban’s approach) by the award-winning composer Peter Flint.

21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body (2024)

London artists perform a series of somatic choreographies. The focus on interiority and embodied experiences creates a palimpsest for the scores we keep in our bodies. Hand-processed 16mm film superimposed over long, single shots of the London sky.

Installation appeared in South London’s Laurie Grove Baths along with 6 silk organza prints 300cm x 100cm.

21 Scores for Losing Yourself in a Body : : May 2024, 34 London-based artists performed a series of event scores based on somatic exercises and internal choreography. After learning about each artist and their current interests, I searched through the event scores to find an exercise to essentially bridge our practices. The overlaps were serendipitous and profound. I was frequently moved by the trust and daring of the creatives in the studio who allowed me to film the exercises digitally and on 16mm. My unorthodox approach was met with openness and a willingness to go there — sometimes way out there as you will see by some of the movements.

Axiogenesis (2024)

In Axiogenesis, determinism and causation are examined from both quantum and poetic views. Axiogenesis, or the philosophic idea of existential optimism, is held up to the light and used as a prism to deconstruct the more common future-focused anxiety that is often experienced throughout our daily lives. The “both/and” is simultaneously fixed and flexible and is a necessary positionality to engage with these quantum works where the poiesis of meaning can be recalculated and reconfigured with each passing moment. 

A passage from Simone Weil and a poem from the Godfather of San Francisco Beat poetry, Kenneth Rexroth. In the poem, the speaker contemplates their life with an ephemeral existentialism in a triad of unfolding eras; imagining their life unfold before them as a child, experiencing all-consuming eros as an adult, and backwards processing a life from the far side of the hill. Dusted with fossilised micro-algae skeletons, the sculpture holds up geological temporalities creating embodied perception and centring our humanity through the inevitable biophilic.

Will to Power (2024)

[Things don’t happen unless something makes them happen.]

Kenneth Rexroth was influential to a number of midcentury American poets associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and was known, in his lifetime, as “Godfather” of the Beats—he organized and emceed the Six Gallery reading in 1955 where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl.”

Here, one of Rexroth’s erotic poems is brought into dimensional space in this sculptural configuration of the piece. In the poem, the speaker considers their life in a triad of unfolding eras; imagining their life before them as a child, experiencing love as an adult, and looking back at the life one has lived in advanced age.

In Saint-Michel’s latest body of work, she examines determinism and causation from both quantum and poetic views. Axiogenesis, or the philosophic idea of existential optimism is held up to the light and used as a prism to deconstruct the more common future-focused anxiety that is often experienced throughout our daily lives. The “both/and” is both fixed and flexible and is a necessary positionality to engage with these quantum works where the poesis of meaning can be recalculated and reconfigured with each passing moment.

Possible paradigms: autonomisation, relation, biophilia; emergence, complexity, process, individuation, (auto)poiesis; ephemeral existentialism, disintermediation; direct perception, embodied perception, perception-as-action; speculative pragmatism, speculative realism, radical empiricism; meditation, virtualization; ecology of practice, media ecology; technicity; micropolitics, biopolitics, ontopower, the inexorable power of revolt.

In danger, the sea-cucumber divides itself in two (2023)

109 Lockets (2023)

In response to UK-based researcher and advocate, Karen Ingala Smith’s Counting Women project, I created a range of works reflecting on gender-based violence. They include sculptural films, including Each Memory is a Room (2023) and How to Hide This (2023), which is screened within a hollowed-out copy of Plato's Phaedo (On the Soul).

In addition, the collection features poetic objects such as Concealer (2023), a series of mirrored compacts opened at 225°, and 109 Lockets (2023), a collection of 109 individual lockets on chains, each representing a woman killed by a man in the UK in 2022. These lockets are filled with an assortment of words extracted from the pages of Plato's Phaedo, leaves, seeds, and pantry staples, presented as a poignant assemblage.

This cycle of work culminated with the release of the poetry collection, Liner Notes for Getting Out Without Catching Fire: Deluxe and Standard editions (Bad Saturn 2023).

Concealer (2023)

Installation

[[even a stopped clock is right twice a day]] (2021)

Projected film for opposing walls, bubbles. 16 min
Featuring a qudraphonic score by Dr. Sophie Stone

The collaborative audio-visual project [[even a stopped clock is right twice a day]] by artists Michèle Saint-Michel and Sophie Stone explores how we create order in our lives during times of chaos. The work asks the audience to view opposing screens simultaneously and interrogate the desire to confirm synchronisation. The effervescent visuals showcase an endlessly primping, mask-like visage in muted pastels of coral pinks and aqua blues. The audio is filled with birdsong and rain. At the center of it all: a vivid, driving countdown clock.

The piece premiered at the Grand Magazine in Fort Amherst, Chatham, Kent, England. It was also screened at the 2022 Music and/as Process Conference: Music and Interdisciplinary Practice at the University for the Creative Arts - Farnham Campus.

The Immortal Charlie Parker (2021)

Audio poem, 19 min

Artist Michèle Saint-Michel fuses poetry and music with news reportage in her powerful audio piece, The Immortal Charlie Parker. In it, she recounts her experience of reconnecting with a childhood friend during the early stages of the pandemic.

The Hole (2021)

The Hole is a poetry film by Michèle Saint-Michel in collaboration with Cypriot poet Nora Nadjarian. Nadjarian reads two poems in the piece, “Digging” and “The Hole” from which the title of the film takes its name. Visually, we travel across three planes: deeper into a forest, deeper into the sea, and deep into the Earth’s core. We travel past the Earth’s crust, reaching the mantle, past the water’s surface and the tree line. We move deeper: punctuated by malleable areas of semi-solid magma, noticing fish, and the forest’s canopy. We reach the center of the Earth. It is a hot, dense core; dreams and memories have room to blossom here, creating light in the darkness. Note the English word for “touch” is repeated in Armenian (դպչիլ), German (berühren), French (toucher), and Greek (αγγίζω). Nadjarian narrates the film.

About Nadjarian
Nora Nadjarian is an Armenian–Cypriot poet and short story writer. She writes in English and Armenian, as well as Greek. Her writing mostly centres on the island of Cyprus, especially the partition of Cyprus into North and South, though there are numerous works of universal themes.

Abyss Triptych (2020-21)

Abyss Triptych is an experimental, three-channel installation film and includes the abyss welcomes us, the abyss doesnt divide us, and the abyss surrounds us. The films express a Melvillian sense of much activity without substantial progress. US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo says that ruin and reinvention are inseparable. But must we give everything like Captain Ahab, or half of our body like the holothurian of Wisława Szymborska’s poem ‘autonomy’?

“In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two. / It abandons one self to a hungry world / and with the other self it flees. // It violently divides into doom and salvation, / retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.” What are we willing to sacrifice for advancement and how many times can we cut ourselves in two? How much healing can one body take? As Szymborska says: “We, too, can divide ourselves, it’s true. / But only into flesh and a broken whisper. / Into flesh and poetry.”

How will you divide yourself? What are you willing to leave behind?

the abyss welcomes us was named an Official Selection in the 2021 Cadence Poetry Film Festival in Seattle, Washington.

Borrowing a narrative storytelling approach from director Lizzie Borden, the PTSD Suite uses vignettes, allegories, poetry, and sometimes dictionary entries to create a liminal world at the center of many overlapping Venn diagrams.

The PTSD Suite is a collection of short experimental films that explore the symptoms and lived experience of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Each film is named after a common symptom of PTSD. Saint-Michel teamed up with a different experimental musician and / or composer for each piece. While each piece sounds unique, all are underpinned by a familiar pattern: the Fibonacci sequence. The films reuse much of the archival footage and analog textures, creating an uncanny experience of uncertain deja-vu, an effort to mimic an experience of PTSD for the viewer.

TROUBLE SLEEPING had its Mexican premiere as an Official Selection at the Mexican Institute of Cinematography in Mexico City, Mexico, April 2022.

HYPERVIGILANCE had its Spanish premiere as an Official Selection at the Biodedromo Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain, October 2021.

STARTLE RESPONSE had its US premiere as an Official Selection at the Prismatic Ground Experimental Documentary Film Festival in association with the Maysles Documentary Center in NYC, April 2021.

Most of the seven short films screened at the Great Wave Festival in Berlin, Germany in 2020.

inhale / exhale (2020)

Multi-channel installation

The inhale/exhale film series is in conversation with the work of film diarist Anne Charlotte Robertson and the self-portraits of artist Eleanor Antin. When played together, the main figure flits from screen to screen in a dizzying choreography, existing everywhere and nowhere.

"The struggle of all artists, but the womxn artist in particular, to show up and allow ourselves to be seen authentically in artistic terms, in nurturing roles, as sexual beings, as multi-dimensional stardust wrapped in flesh and bone—it’s all a lot to be going on with. I hope some of that nuanced multidimensionality comes through in this work."

Transmettre (2021)

Named an Official Selection for the 20 seconds of 2020 for the Dérapage festival (22 years and running) in Montreal, Canada.

Transmettre, created specifically for the 2020 In 20 seconds artists’ call from Dérapage, is an experimental, non-narrative work exploring connection, transmission, and quantum entanglement. The piece attempts, by the force of its atmospheres, to make viewers see with new eyes the year that sculpted the “Before times” from the ether.

The piece includes this declaration: We must begin to hold competing ideas as distinct, yet inextricably interconnected. We must make space for complexity, nuance, and data points. We must find strength in our flexibility. Recognize that our binaries both do not define us and-both/and are essential. We must become more comfortable with our discomfort and increasingly attuned to its arrival.

Like water, we are now challenged to become persistent, erosive, and devastating; AND yielding, restorative, and life-giving. Our storytelling must operate with this same multiplicity and multidimensionality. It must move atomically. We must tell stories that can penetrate bone and be absorbed directly into the marrow. Our approach must operate via a matrix of understanding and unlearning: a topography, a geography, and an oral history. Works must be taken in like pulling down the washing when it starts to rain. We must hold them under our own skin, at arm’s length, and like someone we hate who’s come to us in tears. The work must become an unsolvable enigma and we must share every answer.

Other Collaborations

More from Michèle Saint-Michel