Elsa Philippe

Profile/CV

Excess, the main theme of my work is connected by the creation of different characters always played by myself. These characters all inhibit a world of strange and dark landscapes that culminate in the excesses of mainstream popular culture as viewed through a juxtaposition with children’s television, pop music videos and other digital avatars. I develop this main focus with different medias, such as video and video-performance. Video allows me to work with video collage, picking up images and video clips from digital sources to create these excessive landscapes. The creation process for characters and landscapes of my video collages is based on an absurd personal diary that I hold . This written diary is then turned into a visual diary, in which images are filed into different categories, that lead to an important image bank that I use to create my landscapes. I work as an excessive collector of images and video clips, which work to inform the themes of my work. My films act to visualize the intrepid story lines of my diary interwoven with the open accessibility of pop culture allowing the audience to understand the diary as an object which initiates the start of process. Using tales of pop culture allows me to blur the line of distinction between the real and the fictional. I don’t want my work to be understandable as autobiographical but rather entitle the viewer to create their own interpretation of the story by setting the tone of the visual story line through a narrative open to individual interpretation.

Website vimeo.com/elsaphilippe/videos