Artist

Elysée Nouvet

A graduate of Goldsmiths College MA in Visual Anthropology, Elysée Nouvet has curated, filmed, directed, edited, and managed a variety of visual projects in Canada, Nepal, and Nicaragua. In her work, Elysée explores the possibilities and challenges of making images speak in a sensual language that can convey power’s grip on (and work through) bodies. Whether looking at caste in Nepal or the social abandonment of pesticide-afflicted workers in Nicaragua, Elysée’s filmmaking evokes the feeling of social inequalities and violence. Furthermore, Elysée brings under scrutiny conventional modes of consuming, thinking about, and responding to images of suffering. Questions she is asks include, How do we expect subjects of violence to look and speak on camera? Do we pin hopes on the disenfranchised? If so, what are these hopes? Why these? Who is pitiful and who is pitiless? Whose stories count? How does the consumption of suffering reinforce social, economic, racial, and moral divisions?

Elysée’s films have been shown at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival (Vancouver), aluCine Toronto Latin Media Festival, Re/Frame Peterborough International Film Festival, Planet in Focus Environmental International Film and Video Festival (Toronto), Festival of Visual Anthropology ASPEKTY (Torun, Poland), Royal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Films (Leeds, U.K), as well as discussed in various academic conferences. Elysée will complete her doctorate in Social Anthropology at York University in 2011.

Videography

Terra Sacer (Sacrificed Land)

2008, 17:30 minutes, colour, English and Spanish with English subtitles

Being Dalit

2007, 38:42 minutes, colour, Nepali with English Subtitles