Stéphanie Lagarde
Minimal Sway While Starting My Way Up, 2021, 15 minutes
Stéphanie Lagarde (Toulouse, 1982) is a French visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris. Her work explores how people control space and territory, and the political, social and economic structures underlying these forms of control. She combines film, sound, text and digital imagery to create layered and often associative narratives. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Berlinische Galerie and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne.
In Minimal Sway While Starting My Way Up (2021), an intelligent elevator takes centre stage. The elevator speaks, observes and questions itself as it moves through a vertical world: from the depths of a mine to the heights of skyscrapers. Lagarde connects these two extremes. The skyscraper represents economic power, speculation and the dream of technological progress; the mine represents the extraction of the raw materials that make this world possible. The elevator thus becomes an unexpected protagonist and a metaphor for a system that wants to build ever higher while digging ever deeper into the earth. Part of the film was shot at the KONE High-Rise Laboratory in Lohja, Finland, where new elevator technologies are developed and tested 350 metres underground in an active limestone mine. From this remarkable in-between space—where the technologies of the future are simulated—Lagarde lets the elevator reflect on progress, power, desire and the future of the Earth.
The film received the Best Film Award at the Beijing International Short Film Festival in 2021 and the National Award at Leiden Shorts in 2022.
