The moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray is the continuation of a project initiated in 2017, a film that could evolve along with Rosalind Nashashibi and her friends & loved ones who appear on screen, in dialogue with a narrative from science fiction.

The team horse goes astray is the answer to conversations held by Rosalind and Elena Narbutaitė during Part 1. «How life can be crafted, shaped, questioned? Played and be real,» writes Elena.(1)

It’s the moment when a loss of linearity, first evoked in words, begins to be felt on bodies. It’s the team horse that goes astray, a mission that may be going awry all the while keeping our eyes ahead, towards the horizon, towards the coming snow.

Before I was born
The lilac bloomed
[Do you know it?]
And after I die
It will bloom as before
From sun and from wind
The petals will fall
And spread like sun
All over my heart.

Pronounced in the film, this poem was written by Lithuanian poet Salomėja Nėris. When I first wrote to Elena proposing an exchange with Rosalind, she had been looking for the original version of the poem, our offer in continuation with her train of thought. As I read it once again, I think of one of Elena’s works in Between Ears, New Colours: Sun, a laser created in collaboration with engineers, projecting a ray of light that, upon touching the wall, propagates like a solar spot. My eyes see a mist, a luminous material made of blurry spots, a snowy surface: “Snow is coming.” The latent state of Rosalind’s film compares to the state in which I find myself while observing Elena’s laser.

At the end of the film, once the sun has set, the camera slowly follows the horizon that cuts the screen in half. Thinking of the horizon often brings me to paintings I’ve come across in Brittany (2). Sometimes hung horizontally, these paintings seem like doorways, splits that solicit our gaze and our thoughts through lines and folds.

The film takes us through varying atmospheres, at times intimate (interior) and fictive (exterior), situated somewhere on this line. Not a perspective but a kind of middle ground where our pasts and futures meet and imagine, the horizon, so beautiful.

Antoine Aupetit, Richard Neyroud & Thomas Patier

(1) Email, June 16, 2020.
(2) Reference to Geneviève Asse (born in Vannes, France, 1923): https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/genevieve-asse/