TITLE: The Gertrud Project

"The Gertrud Project" was realized in 2019 with student actors. These offbeat, cheerful, severe or enigmatic performative portraits are the result of a work on parallels between the BAUHAUS total art school in the 1930s and my own artistic practice. The series is composed of about twenty portraits of mysterious, diverse, dreamlike characters, gravitating in the same universe, whose coherence lies in their complementarity and the diversity of the emotions expressed and felt by the viewer.
This is the result of photographic improvisations, where each character was created and photographed without anticipating the final result, using recovered and diverted objects, fabrics, materials, lamps, various objects, experimenting, as Gertrud Arndt did in the early 30s for her Mask Portraits series. It is therefore a live report of the moment of creation in its raw state.

If I had to sum up this series in one sentence, I would say that The Gertrud Project aims to highlight a point of convergence, through time and space, of experimentations, freedoms, contexts and desires.
Drawing from the universe of Gertrud Arndt to produce, not only a tribute, but an artistic assumed continuity, is also talk about the questions of an era and to put into perspective our artistic current events, our cultural, political and societal life. Behind the frozen in time smiles and looks, lies a confrontation of contexts, between the nowaday Europe and the 1930s one, in the clash of creative bubbles, multiple crises and anxieties about the rise of fascism.

The choice of black and white and its very particular treatment (noise, blurring, vignetting, distortions, erasures and overexposed parts) is one of the means of anchoring the series in an atemporality, questioning the contemporaneity of the works. The artistic approach pays great attention to the materiality of the pictures, making each almost tangible.

AUTHOR: Alexandra Vidal (France)

I am a French photographer, an architect, an actress and a drawer; it is in transdisciplinarity that I blossom artistically. I am looking for the widest opening and research through several arts. My photographic universe develops mainly around the performative portrait. It is therefore highly experimental and instinctive. At the same time, it is nourished by numerous pictorial, theatrical, cinematographic, photographic and historical references.I therefore wish it to be rich and accessible, poetic and offbeat, questioning as much as it moves.

My current work develops more and more around the alternative mask, and tends even more towards a total art: photography, costume, mask design and creation, exhibition space with scenography, light and specific sound creation adapted to the works.