Etoile
(2019)

Skating rinks, like swimming pools, embody the artificiality of sites designed to reproduce, control and transform the use of natural spaces: petrified landscapes, surrounded by terraces. At the rink the water is frozen and the bodies become lighter in the horizontality of a continuous movement upon the frozen surface. Slipping is the first affordance of ice. The second is to break. Following the narrative curve of a character who seeks to escape its condition by clinging to a dream, there is a hope of being, of becoming someone else. By getting dramatically involved in a discipline in constant search of her next best talent, Anaïs Wenger plays the game of spectacularizing the artist at work who is asked to be both identifiable and unexpected, visible and mysterious, efficient and authentic.