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“Passage” is a fictional film that portrays the meeting between two people: a young artist and a gallery owner. The rapprochement of these two characters is a metaphor of the movement that takes place when a street artist, with his codes and his culture, finds himself projected into a more institutionalized circuit embodied by the gallery: that of the market and the museum. Without judging or presuming the reasons that motivate this displacement, we can observe that this encounter imposes itself as an obviousness, and that it produces above all something new. Indeed, urban art in the gallery is much more than a simple portage from one wall to another, from one frame to another: it is a paradigm shift.
Thus, in “Passage“, the encounter between these two worlds transforms the respective realities of the protagonists, so that together they create a new dimension. A dimension that coexists with the two initial dimensions. The story is based on a staging with bipolar energy that will put in tension the two realities far from our characters: first side by side, then face to face when the artist decides to invest the wide wall that looks at the gallery, on the other side of the alley. Unexpectedly, the gallery will turn into a giant pinhole camera, a camera obscura, and in turn it will observe the street in the true sense of the word: the work of the street artist is naturally projected in real time on the walls and on the gallery owner herself.

“Passage” is also, at its core, a film that takes an existential look at art. An incarnation of the artistic gesture as a vital and transcendental movement. Like a breach to let life pierce through, a vanishing point to refuse one’s condition. It is a perpetual and universal phenomenon: since the dawn of time, human beings have been producing art by repeating this movement. Consciously or not from elsewhere.

Year of production: 2017
From: Theodore Berg Boy et Aymeric Colletta
With: Nil Lilamand Sadar, Manolo Mesa et Renk
Production: Urban Art Fair et OSSI Productions