All works on 16mm film
In person only
Microscope is excited to present the NYC premiere of the 16mm film “Invasive Plants” by Le Ratoire, a filmmaking collective composed of members from two film labs based in France, namely: Katherine Bauer, Joyce Lainé, and Loïc Verdillon, from Atelier MTK in Grenoble, and Léa Lanoë, and Pierre Borel from Labo L’argent in Marseille
Described by the collective as “a canoe odyssey down the Hudson River,” Invasive Plants is a 16mm film shot over the course of three weeks - between August 28 and September 18, 2023 - by the artists as they travel from Troy to New York City on the Hudson River and live alongside it. The images they collect on film — of animals, people, vegetation, industrial and natural landscapes, etc. — are developed at night using the invasive plants they encounter and the river’s water to process the film.
Le Ratoire, a name that in French hints at both the words “lab” and “failure,” is a group of artists coming together with the proposition of making a movie from start to finish almost as a single act, as a joint organism, often with any materials they have at their disposal, and in extremely little time. About their methodology for filmmaking the artists explain: “each film is defined by a particular set of parameters; both technical and, especially, situational.”
The screening includes four additional hand-processed 16mm films for both single and double projection, completed between 2019 and 2022 by the collective: “Avalanche,” “L’Isle,” “Flash Info,” and “Narcissus and The Travel Agency.”
The five artists will be in attendance and available for a Q&A following the screening.
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Le Ratoire is a filmmaking collective composed of Léa Lanoë, Pierre Borel (Labo L'argent, Marseille, France), Katherine Bauer, Joyce Lainé, and Loïc Verdillon (Atelier MTK, Grenoble, France). Since 2019, they have elaborated a methodology for collective filmmaking wherein each film is defined by a particular set of parameters; both technical and, especially, situational. Sometimes referring to their practice as “action-filming,” the members of le Ratoire meet to create all aspects and stages of the film in a single go, from filming, processing, and printing to the final edit. The name “Le Ratoire” refers to the verb in french, rater, that means “to miss, fail, or flunk” and laboratoire, indicating the analog hand-made laboratory practices that each film is made with.
Members bios of Le Ratoire :
Katherine Bauer manipulates celluloid film and the cinematic apparatus encompassing the practices of moving and still image, installation and live performance. Bauer invokes mythologies and folklore as told through the means of obsolete technologies fusing them with mineral and vegital communications. She is represented by Microscope Gallery (New York). Her work has been exhibited and screened at; Hybris Festival (Brazil), The Pompidou Center (France), Lausanne Underground Film Festival (Switzerland), Estudio Teorema (Mexico), Shoot the Lobster (Germany); Anthology Film Archives, The Knockdown Center, The Museum of the Moving Image (New York) among others. Bauer received a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant (2023), ESP TV Unit 11 residency (2017), Handmade Film Institute research grant (2016), a Cité Internationale des Arts Paris Residency (2012-13), and a Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation Fellowship (2012-13). She holds a BA in Film Arts from Bard College and a MFA from NYU Steinhardt in Studio Art. She is on the Board of Directors for The Film-Makers Cooperative of New York and a member of the film collectives Optipus (NY), Le Ratoire, and Atelier MTK (France). She also studied herbalism and worked on various medicinal gardens throughout her life. In the Hudson Valley, NY she worked for Good Fight Herb Company, Common Hands Farm, and The Abode. She currently lives and works between New York and France.
Pierre Borel is a saxophonist, composer and filmmaker, working in the field of improvised and experimental music and experimental cinema. From 2006 to 2017 he was residing in Berlin taking part of the high flow of ongoing creativity that is centered there. He has performed in most European countries, Japan, Russia and USA and is a regular playmate of Joel Grip, Hannes Lingens, Sven-Are Johansson, Christian Lillinger, Axel Dörner, Tobias Delius to name a few. He obtained a master degree at the Jazz Institute in Berlin in 2008, and continues questioning sound and composition through his studies in electro-acoustic music in Marseille. Together with Florian Bergmann and Hannes Lingens, he was running the Umlaut Berlin collective that in recent years released a great number of records and organized four festivals of improvised music. He moved to Marseille in 2017, and co-founded LaboLargent, an artists run organization for experimental filmmakers.
Léa Lanoë After studying history of art and literature in Paris (Université Paris-Diderot) and Berlin (TU), Léa Lanoë studied at Ecole National Superieur dʼArt in Bourges, working on sound installations and collages. Between 2013 and 2017, she lived in Berlin, performed in the group Vermulscht, and focused more on experimental filmmaking. In her work, she often collaborates with musicians. In 2017, she takes part in the Master degree of Documentary filmmaking in Lussas, France, where she makes her first documentary film Nul Nʼest Censé, screened in Les États Généraux du film documentaire, Lussas, Le Festival du Court Métrage de Clermont- Ferrand, Festival les inattendus, Lyon, 2019. She now lives in Marseille, where she created with Pierre Borel and other filmmakers LʼArgent, an artists run laboratory for Analog filmmaking, and works more and more with 16mm.
Loïc Verdillon is a musician, performer, and printmaker. Between 2012 and 2019 he composed music for theater pieces by the company “mais ou l’as-tu.” Since 2010, he’s been an active participant of the musical and cinematographic program at Le 102 in Grenoble, France. Currently, his research is focused on sound, its materiality and forms. He built “yotta-phone,” a performance for multiple megaphones, played at different festivals in the summer of 2015. His graphic works focus on the sound shapes of Ernest Chladni in experimental engraving. In 2015, he combined plastic and audio art for the installation of an “attraction park” made up of dissected loudspeakers, working with the primitive elements of copper, paper, and magnets. Since 2016, he has run and worked at Atelier MTK Independent Cinema Laboratory in Grenoble, France. He has presented Expanded Cinema performances and organized 16mm workshops around the world, in such places as Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Belgium, and Indonesia.
Alongside studies in physics and comparative literature, Joyce Lainé (aka Lucrecia) begins making films through the encounters with people & visions from the NYC film scene (Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, and Christine Choy). She moves to Grenoble, France and becomes involved in programming at the 102, an alternative venue for experimental film, music and collective organizations. She also joins Atelier MTK and after participating in a research seminar seeking to fabricate the 1903 autochrome color photography process on film, creates a collective performance called "Fecula est-tu là?" (2017) with Clovis LeMaireCardoen, Loic Verdillon, and Etienne Caire. Her first personal film made in France was “40 active warheads” (2016), an adaptation of a poem by Daniel Owens, mixing found and personal footage. Recent works include performances with the Un Ensemble, Etienne Caire, Pavel Viry, and the films within the collective called “Le Ratoire." Today she continues to work at Atelier MTK.