Clément Cogitore. Braguino ou la communauté impossible
Curators Diane Dufour and Léa Bismuth
Exhibition produced by LE BAL as part of the LE BAL de la Jeune Création award with ADAGP
In 2016 Clément Cogitore travels to Braguino, named after the family living in some wooden shacks dispersed in the deep Siberian taiga, 700 km away from any human presence. With this gesture, he wishes to uncover the mystery of Sasha Bragin’s choice; he is a man from a community of Old Believers, who decided to move to that place with his family more than thirty years ago, chasing the hope of living in peace, in complete autarky, and to build a self-sufficient model of life.
Very quickly, however, this paradise becomes the background of an open conflict between two families unable to share the same space. The failure of this would-be community will be at the center of Clément Cogitore’s cinematographic, photographic and sound work.
Submerged in darkness, this installation takes the visitor to the heart of a narrative by visual scenes, in which each and every film fragment reveals a part of the story, in a unit of time, place and action: the arrival in Braguino by helicopter, Sasha’s dream, the bear hunt, the mysterious island where children go to be alone, ending with the increasing intensity of the threat of an armed conflict. All of this propels us into a darkening world, as suggested by the large, bright photographs with opaque tones that enclose our path.
Using the challenging elements of archaic storytelling, which evokes the conflictual creation of the great myths, Braguino narrates the experience of a double impossibility: we can’t flee nor stay, that is, we can’t come to terms with the Other, the cursed part in ourselves. Clément Cogitore goes beyond a simple ethnographic study: he introduces us to a cruel story “revealing a moment in which our civilization lost its balance“. If this world is doomed to disappear, what does this disappearance mean?
Braguino is not only a movie: it is an interdisciplinary artistic project that combines cinema, photography and video. It took the form of an immersive installation, a film and a book
