Anne Parisien lives and works in Montreal where she is completing a master’s degree in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Previously practising photography and having completed a bachelor’s degree in this discipline at Concordia University, her present work in video reflects this trajectory. Through the fixed and frontal framing of her works as well as through their static duration, her video pieces become spaces between suspension and movement. In September 2010, further video work will be shown at the UQÀM Gallery.

There is a seduction in the impression that a memory leaves us, in what is left for us to desire. In this sense, a childhood memory is unique. It is one of shared intimacy, of a certain physical proximity no longer accessible despite its inherent desire. It remains lost and impossible to recover. However, the fragment that is left to linger persists in trying to pursue its existence in our memory. It agitates in our thoughts a need to preserve it, a way to inscribe it in the present. 

It is a fear of loss. The survival of what persists in our memory can only be ensured by the construction of its story. Through the holes left by forgetfulness, these fragments engage their own fiction, and, paradoxically, can only exist through it. This fiction gives us a glimpse, not of a narrative but rather of  something felt, of a reality. 

"A performance act permits me to reinterpret, and therefore stretch the fragments of recollections which time has kept to itself. Executed by myself in collaboration with certain members of my family, this act renders visible, through touch and body proximity, through rhythm and gesture positions, both my loss and desire. The presented bodies become detached, lost, intertwined and exhausted through the endurance of sustaining themselves.

The video reveals a desire to return to the past confronted by its impossibility. The video permits, through its form, a visible access to this inner confrontation. It perpetually, in its slowed temporality and its looped projection, recycles itself without any expectation of finality. Thus the video becomes a potential extension of my floating memory, living independently from my body. Through a communication gap, it can only offer the viewer a certain potential for interpretations."

-Anne Parisien