Magic, a portrait of Joris

Chloë Delanghe, Belgium, 2018, 15’

European Media Art Festival

2019

In Magic, a portrait of Joris, images sourced from different periods in time are glued together. Worn-out VHS footage filmed by the artist’s father is placed beside 8mm images she filmed herself. Both have the same subject: one boy, both a son and a brother. Connecting images of then and now, a new narrative of remembering opens up.

Bio Chloë Delanghe

Chloë Delanghe is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker. Her work dissects imaginations of intimacy, stitching together stories and images relating to family, class, and the camera itself. Her practice presents itself as an entangled knot of photographs where beloved faces, haunted objects, and rooms intertwine disturbingly yet beautifully. Blurring cinematic and photographic genres, her work examines the implications of the act of looking itself. Delanghe’s first book, Reasons to Be Cheerful, was published in 2016 by WIELS and Motto Books. Her mid-length film Hexham Heads, in collaboration with Mattijs Driesen, premiered at Berwick Film and …

In Magic, a portrait of Joris by Chloë Delanghe, we enter the domestic space through the recuperated VHS footage of her father, who captures his everyday with his seemingly novel machine, filming his son, their habitat, the street views from the window. The DV lens becomes a looking glass through which he encapsulates the loves of his life—family photos, (self-made) paper mâché masks, decorations, trinkets, and objects of the familial home. A young boy is playing a video game. His gaze is focussed on an off-screen screen, while his father zooms in on his young face, raptured. Years later, the desire to draw your loved ones near through the lens is extended by the filmmaker with Delanghe’s Super 8 footage of the now adult boy. Here too, he is caught in the throes of a game—his hands shuffle cards, and he exclaims to his opponent with enlivened blue eyes, “I’ve damaged you.”

Rebecca Jane Arthur

Inherent in Delanghe’s work is the unabashed class politics felt in the familial spaces she captures with a loving lens. While capturing the banal—a pile of dirty dishes, the realism of his apartment—she interweaves a touch of magic to the quotidian symbolised through the card game Magic. The film is laced with tenderness as she softly sings about a “Little Boy Blue” who tends to sheep in the meadow. A portrait of a boy becoming a man, of a son and sibling, this portrait of Joris is a keepsake to behold and cherish.

Rebecca Jane Arthur