Since 2021, Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard have developed a collaborative practice including sculpture, installation, video, and drawing. In this work, their personal narratives intertwine with the staging of characters in videos and performances. These characters, drawn from intimate, psychodrama-laden situations, become inanimate dolls once again through sculptures that encapsulate their stories. The carved wooden hands, heads, and feet resemble oversized helmets, isolating voices and gestures that are rendered blind beneath hollowed features—evocative of death masks. These life-sized dolls are dressed in voluminous fabric costumes, satin and velvet, manipulated from within with difficulty, which weighs down their movements. Faceless doubles, they can nonetheless be identified with, through their attitudes and emotional traits.
In these reenactments, scenes bordering on autofiction are celebrated in all their tragic, comic, and nebulous tenderness—portraying an emotional state in which the dolls endlessly fail to communicate. The grotesque quality of their appearance serves to narrate the slow simmer of disappointment and to defuse certain traumas. In Je n’entends plus aucune voix (2021), two characters separate against the backdrop of yellowed wallpaper, engaging in the infinite human comedy—first as a video (Residency at Lindre-Basse – Contemporary Art Center – Synagogue of Delme, 2021), and later as a performance (CAPC, 2022). The reenactment and its shifting contexts heighten the ambiguity between inanimate objects and living beings, between subject and object, between the limits of realistic time and the expanses of fictional space—spaces that begin to feel just as real as the physical world.
The scale of the set, the characters, and their relationship to otherness all distort reality through the lens of experience. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether we’re looking at animated dolls in miniaturized interiors or performers wearing costumes, activated in life-sized models. Breakups, couples, the difficulty of being in a group, the crushing weight of otherness, the violence of friendship, the compromises and reconciliations that keep a story going—all these fuel the endless loop of disintegration between the self and others.
Aubrit and Beillard invite us into these uncomfortable states, where the viewer, drawn into the environment, scrutinizes the ambivalent psychology of each puppet—figures that could just as easily be us. In Avec inquiétude mais aussi avec espoir (2021), a full-scale kraft paper house breaks the fourth wall, pulling the audience into a family scene and its potential discomfort—without ever having truly invited them. We are in their home, and yet, also in our own. The believability of these situations, the hope embedded in waiting rooms of the emotional kind, the absence of a clear script, the ennui of human pettiness—these all become fixed in the limited palettes of each character’s repetitive actions. An effective flatness stretches the felt duration of reality while simultaneously opening its abysses.
In the film Gris Clair (2022), two characters argue on a bed, captured in a tight, continuous shot. The viewer, a voyeur of their emotional maelstrom, witnesses a heavy atmosphere—the kind that lingers in the image, evoking the cinematic tones of Chantal Akerman or Béla Tarr, oscillating between documentary and the fiction of observed reality.
Existing both as costumes and sculptures, the dolls function as transitional objects—porous interfaces for emotional gaps. They embody dissociated figures, projecting forms of “collective repression.” In Je veux que tu meures (2022), characters from different time periods coexist aboard a spaceship set. Their relationships grow tense, where unspoken feelings court the desire to end domination, manipulation, or the erasure of the other. Within these theatrical narratives, the characters develop a fiction of trauma, from which the potential for consolation emerges—through the geometry of their connections. The dolls collapse as much as they comfort each other in the face of the complexity of otherness. Everything unravels—each character drifting through fiction like a psyche teetering on the edge, bloated with neuroses and threatening, once again, to literally fall apart as they move precariously through the set. Stories, too, collapse—one into another. It’s a film that never quite stops beginning again.
— Fiona Vilmer
