Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Back to Basics program / AUGUST 2023
France Rreally
USA
www.france-rreally.com
About
France Rreally is a multimedia artist working with video
art, documentary, performance, and fabric to reflect the
reality of constant change and the personal agency it makes
possible. He uses accessible materials like consumer digital
cameras, handmade sets, and found ephemera to guide
journeys between banal everyday life and ridiculous digimagical
fairytale worlds. With a world in flux, systems can
be undermined, human identity and form is fluid, and reality
itself is complex and customizable--empowering users to
take what's in reach to create their ideal lives.
He is a member of the NYC/Philadelphia film and video art
collective Krissy Talking Pictures and has performed and
screened his work online and around North America and
Europe including at BRIC Arts Media, the Hudson Valley
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sameheads Berlin, and
various film festivals such as Film Diary NYC, Antimatter
Media Art, and Cactus Club Independent Film Festival. He is
based out of Brooklyn, NY, where he is always becoming and
re-becoming himself.
Movie storyboarding and filming
Most of my time during the residency was spent on the
earliest stages of an upcoming movie I’m creating. I spent
the first two weeks of the month coming up with an idea,
creating a workable storyboard, making costumes and
gathering props, then the last two weeks filming, filming, and
more filming.
While I had wanted to come prepared with an original
idea and hit the ground running, it took arriving at Arteles
and experiencing the surroundings without a cellphone
or internet for the story to reveal itself. I sewed original
costumes for the three central characters out of found fabric
and free clothing. I shot footage in the forest, on the road,
by the lake, and in front of a green screen, and was lucky
to share the screen with a few other enthusiastic residents
who helped me bring my ideas to life. With every element of
the movie, I encouraged myself to follow my intuition. I was
striving to trust the story I was creating and allow meaning
to emerge from the ideas instead of the other way around.
Then, what started as disjointed images in my mind gradually
revealed themselves to be springing from the same source
as cohesive components of a larger picture.
Though I have a long road until the project is finished, it is
invaluably steeped with the lively worlds I experienced in and
around the forest, moments of present awareness, and the
support of those I met in my time at Arteles.