The Power Plant

Dutch artist Manon de Boer captures people in the process of remembering. For her Canadian debut at The Power Plant, she presents film portraits of two women recalling their formative years in Paris in the 1970s. Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003) depicts the star of the famed soft-core Emmanuelle films reminiscing about her past. Resonating Surfaces (2005) meanwhile, creates a picture of both Paris and São Paulo through the memories of Suely Rolnik, a psychoanalyst, translator and former lover of Gilles Deleuze.

Departing from traditional narrative cinema’s reliance on images of women, de Boer creates complex, poetic portraits that privilege texture and the female voice – overlapping elements that keep picture, sound and text in a state of flux. Akin to the experimental novels of Marguerite Duras, de Boer circles around her subjects but never seeks to fix them. Characters are elusive, memory is flexible and bodily experience shapes subjectivity.