Maïder Fortuné lives and works in Paris. She studied literature and then theatre at the École Jacques Lecoq, before joining the Studio des arts contemporains du Fresnoy in Tourcoing. It was there she met Canadian artist Annie MacDonell (b. 1976), with whom she has collaborated since 2015, notably on the films Communicating Vessels (2020) and Outhere (For Lee Lozano) (2021). Since 2007 she has taught film and writing in art schools.
From Totem (2001) to Outhere (For Lee Lozano), the filmic worlds of M. Fortuné are shot through with an uneasy strangeness. They are unapologetically artificial, and using the inherent ghostliness of all images and playing on our sense that they are memorials, they contain within themselves a sort of uncertainty. We do not see a whole, but we do see the phantom sign of something else, a remnant, a lingering psychic imprint. The images evoke a collective unconscious, conjuring up icons of Western fantasy (Licorne, 2007; Curtain !, 2007), the entertainment industry (Once forever, 2008), the world of theatre (Characters, 2008) or the early days of cinema (Totem; Aurore, 2011). Elsewhere, works draw on literature, borrowing from Rainer Maria Rilke, Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf for Carousel (2015), LEJ (2013), Parnassus Mnemosyne (2015) and The Yellow Blind (2015), the images of one project echoing those of another. Everything is transitory, unstable and liable to shift, splitting and drifting: like this, the artist opens the door to a new kind of plasticity of representation, plunging viewers into a genuine experience of the image and of the processes acted upon it. Through this porous circulation of elements, through repetition, variation and superimposition, the artist forges and develops the visual structures and non-linear narratives of these works.

Past, present and future are united in M. Fortuné’s first mid-length film, L’Inconnu de Collegno (2018). The film revisits the Collegno Amnesiac case in Italy in the 1920s and ‘30s: a man who has suffered amnesia is ascribed two potential identities, and thus two conflicting socio-political histories. In Communicating Vessels (2019), she retraces the gestures made by Lygia Clark (1920-1988) in her Caminhando performance (1963), once again knotting together past, present and future as she cuts a Moebius strip from a printed page of her own CV.

This temporal porousness extends to bodies, and these too are acted upon. Breastfeeding bodies, pregnant bodies, separated or examined bodies, as well as the working bodies of M. Fortuné and A. MacDonell conducting their technical and visual practices – each operating in dialogue with others. In Outhere (For Lee Lozano) the artists confront the pedagogical experience of artist Lee Lozano’s (1930-1999) erasure. In the film, faces are almost supernaturally fused with matter, movement and machines, blurring the edges of a sense of individuality and showing it to be illusory. She becomes they, plural, objects multiply, and more and more we experience a transference, according to the word’s original, theoretical meaning – a specific shift of affect from one representation to another. By multiplying perspectives and superimposing the lived experience of the different bodies represented, by uniting the signifier and the signified, a unique kind of encounter occurs. “We will use images, words, sounds, the screen’s surface and time itself”, the directors explain, neglecting to mention the spectator’s body, sensations and memories into their universe. So it is that the viewer may become the communicating vessel itself.