Maxime Cavajani (b. 1988, Martinique, France) is a multimedia artist working across experimental video, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time that is in between queer bodies, questioning the “seen” and the “legible.” Thinking through mnemonic functions, they use the slippages in between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, performance and gesture, sound and noise to challenge modes of address. Rather than locating what is in motion, their work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces and reflections. The artist asks the public to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss and love.
Recent exhibitions of Cavajani’s work include group shows at Atelier Gallery and at Past Present Projects, both in Philadelphia, PA and at WorthlessStudios gallery in Brooklyn. Their short film Dans le Blanc des Oeufs was screened at l’EHESS in Paris in 2018. In 2020, they were invited to contribute to the 19th issue of Frog Magazine with an article and collages entitled Le Corps de Rome.
Cavajani earned a teaching certificate from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master’s in Architecture from ÉNSAV (Versailles School of Architecture, France) and a Master in Arts & Languages from EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). They were awarded the Movement Lab fellowship from the Film/Animation/Video department at RISD for the 2023–24 academic year. For the development of their multichannel video installation grounds (chapter1) they were awarded the Susan Cromwell Coslett Traveling Fellowship in 2022 and a Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE at Penn) summer research grant. In 2023 they were supported by a grant from the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation for the publication of an art book accompanying grounds (chapter1). In 2021, they were awarded the Center for Public Art and Space Chair’s Award and in 2019, the Tom of Finland Foundation second prize in the Multiple Figure category for perfection—a study of, a graphite work on paper.
This course is entitled "video through" because it aims to question how video allows us to think through time and through space simultaneously. In this course we will consider video as space, material, and matter. In an approach that prioritizes experimentation in space, we will work in a non-linear fashion: fabricating video in space and fabricating space with video - a constant back and forth. From those experiments, we will learn how to use the properties of video editing, video-making, shooting, and projecting/screening as interconnected tools that deny a singular trajectory of making.
The classroom will become a site. We are going to reject the notion of the studio as solely a place “to record” content. Rather, we will bring content into the space so that the studio can become a displaced site. This displacement is generative because it allows us to complicate the notions of subjects, bodies, agents. The bodies - our bodies - who are going to be in this new “site” are going to become agents of a semi-tangible space. Troubling this question of the space in which recording, and projecting can happen at once will allow us to explore the conceptual possibilities that video offers. It will also allow us to explore questions of memory, time, recording, projection, imaging, re-memory, erasure, subject, voice, performer/performance and more. Through a series of experiments, we will explore the reciprocal interrelationships between the technicalities and the poetics of video installation.
