Stéphanie Roland

She focuses on the conditions governing the appearance, disappearance and mystification of objects and data whose reality seems to escape all attempts at exhaustive knowledge (e.g. artificial intelligence, deep web, high frequency trading, airline company blacklists, phantom islands, darknet, ghost writers). From history to geopolitics, astrology to neuroscience, her practice cuts across different image and narrative registers. Her films explore marginal imaginary, physical or mental regions – abandoned islands, abysses, polar zones – and adopt other points of view likely to give shape to the visual paradoxes specific to these invisible entities that influence political and economic systems and the course of history.

"Absence is terrifying and we sometimes need to compensate for it by telling stories." This truth constitutes the prologue to Podesta Island, a film portrait of a phantom island off the coast of Chile whose existence is disputed. The plot thickens with the presence of three survivors from a shipwreck in the region of the hypothetical island, which was erased from maps in 1935 only to reappear with the advent of the Internet. Deception Island debunks the spectacular aspect of the patriotic account of the Belgian polar expedition to Antarctica (1897-1899) by revealing the degree of disappointment in the adventure, and how dissociation gripped the crew, prisoners of the ice for thirteen months. The Empty Sphere, her more recent filmic essay, resembles a reverse science fiction journey to Point Nemo, also called "the pole of inaccessibility". It presents the fall of an object from space on this location, this isolated zone of the South Pacific where space debris falls.

Stéphanie Roland, Deception Island (2017, 13 min)
Stéphanie Roland, Podesta Island (2021, 23 min) 
Stéphanie Roland, The Empty Sphere (2022, 19 min)