26.09.20 - 17.01.21
Stéphanie Roland. Deception Island
Deception Island is a multidisciplinary work - between performance, film and ins- tallation – which explores the invisible face of a myth of Belgian exploration and develops the narration of a paradoxical non-voyage. This episode, where the official story has been amputated, is replayed by actors in the industrial site of the New Belgica. The project involves the building of a new ship, an identical replica of the Belgica (the expedition’s original ship sank to the bottom of the sea). It was built by prisoners and job seekers undertaking professional retraining.
This skeleton of a ship is, at one and the same time, a source of inspiration for the project, a performance space and a film set, and may be considered as a metaphor for the still evolving, fragmented and incomplete, historical reconstruction. In fact, even if the ship seemed trapped in ice, the astronomical data indicated that the pack ice continued to drift indefinitely. Exclusive use of the dolly throughout the film immerses the audience in a floating and hypnotic universe, where physical disorientations echoes an existential loss of bearings in a mysterious post-industrial age without markers.
Short movie - Time : 14 min.