Joséphine Berthou was born in Rambouillet in 1996. She lives and works in Paris. From 2015 to 2021, she studied film and visual arts at HEAD in Geneva. In 2021, she entered the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris, from which she graduated in 2023.
Joséphine Berthou makes fiction films with a strong documentary and musical comedy element. Her films are incorporated into large-scale installations, and consider the roles that each person acquires in a globalized society where information circulates with ever-increasing immediacy. Joséphine Berthou casts her eye over a wide range of professions: gendarmes, truck drivers, rappers, Internet moderators, hospital cooks and con artists. Based on these singular professional worlds, she creates a narrative, a fiction in which the emotions of the characters are expressed in words and music.
For the Project Room, we’re accompanying Ferdinand, the protagonist of a 2021 film, on his journey. A truck driver and toy deliveryman, Ferdinand sings in his lorry to pass the time and criss-crosses a variety of territories and landscapes day and night. From their shuttle, some aliens, intrigued by the melody coming from the lorry, decide to follow him and send him one of their own. We are invited to watch the film in the very place of the central character, in the midst of cardboard boxes filmed in plastic and glittering with coloured lights, or on a bunk bed and lorry seats: Ferdinand drives his lorry, sings, seduces a cow, dines with colleagues in a roadside restaurant, watches a couple dance in a waking dream or tries to establish a dialogue with the alien child who invites himself into his vehicle. In this way, we gain access to Ferdinand’s solitude as he imagines another life, which he ends up pursuing, guided by the voice of this child from elsewhere.
In this film, Joséphine Berthou took an investigative approach, focusing on the working conditions of road hauliers, the goods they transport, their isolation and their social and even family breakdowns. From motorway service areas to the cab of the lorry, the hours spent on the road are countless for this profession. It’s no coincidence that the title of the exhibition, 11h20, refers to their working conditions, with an average daily working time of 11:20, including six breaks. This temporal reality, combined with the naivety of the songs Ferdinand sings and the most unreal situations he invents for himself, allows us, like him, to view his constraints and obligations with a semblance of lightness and humour. Ferdinand’s imaginary journey plunges us into a timeless perspective, out of the temporality of accelerating flows that generate even more solitude.
Curator: Maëlle Dault
Rendez-vous
Opening
Wednesday 25.09.24, 6-9pm
Visit artist-curator
Wednesday 02.10.24, 7:30pm
with Joséphine Berthou and Maëlle Dault