Commissioned by the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (the hunting and nature
museum in Paris), Marie Losier (whose overwhelming The Ballad of Genesis and
Lady Jaye and uplifting Cassandro the Exotico were unforgettable) treats us to
a playful and dreamlike gem of a film, a distillation of her poetic universe. Armed
with her 16mm camera like a magic wand, she brings back to life the animals
frozen in time for the rest of time. Taxidermize Me pays tribute to her art of
creating and collage once again. Golden bodies, camouflaged, with fur, feathers,
beaks and claws… The result is an explosion of colours, sounds and textures
inside this sleeping museum, seen as though peeping through the keyhole.
Celebrating the solidarity of man and beast, Taxidermize Me blurs the boundaries
between the human and animal kingdoms. In the watchful eyes of the strange
creatures, bears, deer and birds of all kinds, we can read the same innocence,
the same wonder. When a gunshot rings out, the strange creatures – her friends
– collapse, turned into foxes. Underneath the original playfulness and sweetness
of a re-enchanted world, while rejoicing in the extraordinary variety of life, Marie
Losier delves into the “animal question”, not without a certain sense of melancholy
and concern. The fairytale becomes a manifesto, albeit a modest one, and one
that (surprise!) borrows its voice from André Malraux in a call to resistance.
Littered with references, Taxidermize Me implicitly sketches the idea that artists
and animals share in their flesh the same condition, threatened by the same
gun. Producing beauty as the ultimate act of resistance to “the well-founded
hypothesis of a planet without apes and without wild animals”, to go “to the places
of art that are the places where this loss is remembered” (Jean-Christophe Bailly),
involves making us, as viewers, think about this future world where the beauty of
life can only be found in museums. (Claire Lasolle)
Credits
