To present the Fall/Winter 2017 collection, KENZO collaborated with three young filmmakers: Mati Diop, Baptist Penetticobra and Eduardo Williams who express a singular relationship with the world through their works.
How do we inhabit the Earth today in 2017? These filmmakers are part of a generation who is more and more concerned about the frailty of a planet which contours erode to the contact of intensive activities and ecological disasters. They were not chosen randomly — mixed, expatriated, nomads, their intimate vision of the world is expressed through juxtapositions of fictional and documentary places, of hybrid, incompatible or symbiotic bodies.
MATI DIOP – Olympe
Full moon above the city of Paris. A young man crosses the city neighborhoods on his bike, when elsewhere a group of distinguished young people that seem to come from another planet, stroll, smoke and chat. The bluish lights of phones illuminate faces in waiting, the face of the young man with the bike contrasts with the dark blue sky which is not yet night sky. The title of the film, Olympus, draws its inspiration from the name of a popular area in Paris, Les Olympiades. French director Mati Diop captures this parisian night through the eyes and movements of her brother, the model Gard Diop. A dreamy trap score soundtracks Olympe and turns an ordinary night into a moment suspended in time.
BAPTIST PENNETICOBRA – Untitled (Juice)
Somewhere in a studio in Paris. The vertical format chosen by French director Baptist Penneticobra gives his film a pictorial allure. In the center, a black and modern Mona Lisa, delightfully rude and poetic, waxes poetics about orange juice. Soon she’s joined by a young man who imagines himself as the embodiment of an orange juice brand. Monomania is shared and expresses itself in absurd monologues hard to identify: is it rap or spoken word, or is it the way these young people usually express themselves? It doesn’t matter. Intonations, inflections and rhythms fascinate and hypnotize. We never leave the dark place where our heroes are sitting, but we get lost rapidly, disoriented by the detail-rich descriptions in the monologues from which emerge stereotypical Americana landscapes.
EDUARDO WILLIAMS – TZZD
An elf falls asleep in the metro of Buenos Aires. What does he dream of? Maybe of being a young Bolivian man, a robot constructor, evolving in a city that seems to have been built by a child with a wild imagination. In his film, Eduardo Williams continues his project of connecting disjointed terrestrial. From Buenos Aires to La Paz, we move from cool to warm colors, from a fruit and vegetable shop to a dark cave where big metal figures are fabricated. Or maybe something else is being made there. Indeed, it is far away in the phantasmagoric woods of Fontainebleau that those metallic experimentations come to life as agile as voguing dancers. In a few minutes, we travel through three countries, two continents and through the bodies it captures, the voices and sounds it registers, it is the entire world manifesting at our senses.
