Paris Heretics

Lesteria is a sound and performance artist who combines multiple layers of her own voice with a blend of field recordings and instrumentation to create soundscapes that aim to eternalize the experience of her thoughts. The textual element of her vocal performance explores merging and diverging thought processes, representing the compartmentalization of her inner selves, the separation and reunification of layers of self-awareness. She releases these works in audio form, but also performs them live, often with the accompaniment of video projections that cast her as multiple versions of herself.

For this video, our idea was firstly to use the layering of multiple exposures to depict the separation of simultaneous voices coming from the same character. We shot numerous performances of different parts of the text, and combined them into a single timeline. Then we wanted to express the theme of the individual piece: the artist's feeling of alienation and invisibility in society. We filmed the video during the lockdowns, and so we had to rely heavily on digital effects.

This helped inspire the concept of erasing Lesteria's face and replacing it with green screen, which we then filled with star-scapes, morphing shapes, and blank void. Then we gradually inverted the principle so that Lesteria's face was interchangeably a vessel for the increasing vastness of space and a character (or characters) within it. Finally, the face and the space disintegrate into each other, as the text arrives at the question of whether the artist's conceptions of positive and negative space have really been in unity all along.

You can watch the video for Negative Space on our YouTube channel here.