The starting point of this project is a theoretical work about the Festival du film fantastique d’Avoriaz, a festival of horror and fantastic cinema that took place between 1973 and 1993 in the french alps. The ritual of a film festival is decomposed and all the functions are spread into small structures. Thirteen constructions inspired by tropes of horror and fantastic cinema are built, each of them portraying one archetype character. The goal is to reflect on the universal value of such tropes and to express their meaning beyond the closed boundaries of a one-hour-and-a-half movie. How can fiction and imaginary be translated into shapes and spaces? The characters are the following ones:
The victim, the savior, the lovers, the vulnerable, the double, the hidden, the prophet, the unstoppable, the hybrid, the faceless, the undead, the beast & the ghost.
Fantastic cinema is a codified genre. The audience is used to seeing patterns of events, characters, stories, etc. Trying to understand the essence of tropes and finding broad terms to define them allows to talk about more than movies. Those themes give a global idea that becomes interpretable in different fields. The models of the structures are all built on a reduced scale and presented as a small village in an abstract landscape. The act of reinterpreting these archetypes also highlights their universality, their versatility and how they are bound to the interpretation and subjectivity of each and everyone. Even if their origin is connected to Avoriaz, they all have a universal value and are not tied to any specific site, they are part of an open-source toolkit for fantastic events.