Benjamin Bardou

France

Benjamin Bardou is a filmmaker, art director, and director based in Paris. He received his artistic training at the Georges Méliès School in Orly, an institute specialized in teaching animation and visual effects techniques. Benjamin Bardou explores the city, nature, and memory through photogrammetry, a 3D capture technique that he has been developing and drawing inspiration from since 2014. In this way, he places technology at the service of memory, seeking to reconstruct the memories and emotions that cities and art evoke. One of his main sources of inspiration is the work of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, from whom he notably borrows the concept of historical materialism, which he visually reinterprets within the framework of his artworks. His aim is to work with historical materials as well as with simple, prosaic urban elements in order to reach and engage the collective unconscious. His interest in the metropolis has been shaped by the influence of classics such as the film Metropolis, Ghost in the Shell, the photographs of Berenice Abbott, and the manga universe of Katsuhiro Otomo. However, it was his arrival in Paris that transformed this attraction into a true fascination. Bardou sets out in search of the soul of the city. At night, the multitude of streets and the illuminated windows of buildings lend themselves to reverie and imagination. According to him, the form of the city mirrors the memory of places. He explores these different facets through a series of visual poems.

After studying painting, he joined the visual effects industry, where he specialized in matte painting for feature films, commercials, and music videos. Within the studios of Mikros Image, a digital post-production and visual effects company, he now works on the production of feature films, advertising campaigns, and music videos. His work has been exhibited around the world, from Brazil (FILE Machinima) to South Korea (K Museum of Contemporary Art), as well as in France (Collectif Jeune Cinéma and Motion Motion) and Portugal (Centro das Artes), among others.


Benjamin_Bardou_Photogrammetry.jpg

Inferno

Inferno_Benjamin_Bardou_Photogrammetry.mp4

About the artwork


Wandering through Passage Verdeau in Paris.

"Everything must change for nothing to change." — The Cheetah, Luchino Visconti

Music: Within/Namiyoke Inari (Simon James French)

Voice: For Ever Mozart (Jean-Luc Godard)



About the series


“’These passages, a new invention of industrial luxury, are glass-covered galleries, panelled with marble, which cross entire blocks of buildings whose owners have grouped together for such considerations. On either side of these galleries, which receive the daylight from above, are lined up the most elegant stores, so that such a passage is a city, a world in miniature.’ — Illustrated Guide to Paris, 1850


In these covered galleries, countless food stores, restaurants, gadgets, souvenirs, by-products and ready-to-wear items punctuate the stroll of passer-bys. It is a labyrinth where the crowd as well as the merchandise are displayed. These commercial streets are neither completely outside nor completely inside the city. They act as thresholds, places of reverie where time and the consciousness of the flâneur are altered to counter the experience of the shock of the big city. Indeed, these streets, brought to life by iron and glass architecture, are above all a refuge from the inhospitable and blinding experience that is characteristic of megacities. The transformations brought about by modernity and the commercial sphere have reified the urban space. The inhabitants of the city no longer feel at home there; they are beginning to become aware of the inhumanity of the big city.


A threshold, buffer zone, dream zone; the passage is a place where several memories and states of consciousness are superimposed (dream, awakening, awareness). The voluntary memory, that of the chaos of commodity and publicity, rubs shoulders with the collective unconscious, the Ideal and the Utopia. The collective memory is a compound of truth and betrayal, of authentic utopia and phantasmagorical utopia, nurtured by the dream of the commodity. The architecture of the passage is the reification of this thought, and it is thus a testimony of the collective dream.


The passages would appear then as an antechamber of the collective awakening, where dialectic images show themselves in their double sense: on the one hand turned towards the myth and the archaic, the other turned towards the promise of social progress. The awakening of the collective appears then as a synthesis of a dreaming consciousness, and the antithesis of the awakened consciousness.


This artistic project, conceived as a triptych, has the task of presenting these different forms of memory that sway the crowds and circulate amongst the Parisian passages.”


Benjamin Bardou


Though these works can be collected individually, the series was designed as a triptych. The collector of the full triptych will receive an exclusive airdrop of an NFT by Benjamin Bardou. Applicable only once, to the first collector who acquires all three artworks.

technique

photogrammetry

format

landscape

duration

01:13

year

2022

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