Project Presentation
The film features a Phacellophora Camtscatica (egg-yolk jelly), as it drifts in its tank home at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. A voice-over informs the viewer of its baroque but literally brainless anatomy, its voracious cannibalism and its classical forebears. It compiles an extended description of the creature according to various modes of knowledge, perception and understanding, from ancient mythologies to natural sciences and exhibition design.
Shifting from a seemingly banal wildlife TV program about a sea creature towards a description of the physical and architectural conditions of its display in the aquarium, the film looks at how the image pre-exists its own recording, approaching the window of the aquarium as a display device that participates in the construction of the notion of the viewer.
The work was commissioned by LUX, a British film organisation, to be inserted between ads and feature films within a newtwork of commercial cinemas in the UK and Ireland.
It would take around 6 days and 11 hours to watch a two hour film if each shot of the program where the work is inserted was narrated in the same format as Pulmo Marina.
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Between 1995 and 2000 Aurélien Froment studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. He trained simultaneously as a film projectionist, also qualifying in 2000. His work has since developed through exhibitions, films, publications and performances. Since 2001, he has been removing Friedrich Froebels objects from their original educational context to present them in exhibition spaces. In 2005, he completed a video portraying Paolo Soleri’s architectural project of Arcosanti in Arizona, and in 2007, filmed Théâtre de Poche with magician Stéphane Corréas. Since 2010, the jellyfish from his short film Pulmo Marina has popped up on the screens of more than 30 cinemas across the UK. In 2011, Froment released 9 Intervals, a short film series intended to be presented before films by others.
Froment has had solo exhibitions at: Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Aubervilliers; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Module du Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Gasworks, London; and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at: Tate Britain, London; Nam June Paik Centre, Gyeonggi-do; Basel Kunsthalle; Mudam, Luxembourg; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the 8th Gwangju Biennale; Sculpture Center, New York; the 11th Biennale de Lyon; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Aurélien Froment (born in 1976 in Angers, France) currently lives in Dublin, Ireland.
