Chrystel Egal
"Room 0"

With Room 0, Chrystel Egal has recreated her room in New-York with a set-up which blends together film, photography and text. Using filming and photography, she sets out to find the things that surround her and underlie her inspiration: photographs, collages and Post-its on the walls of her room.

Room 0 is the place where she tries to find herself again when the outside world of New-York and its excesse is bewitching her. The dominant tone of the walls, the film and the photographs is Kodak yellow, as though Chrystel Egal is asserting her choice of filming in Super-8 and not in video. The artist feels an affinity for the grainy texture of the image and the tension that necessarily results from the limited duration of the film (the sequence lasts three minutes ten seconds, just the length of one reel). The sountrack is a song by the group Garbage, whose main words stata "What drives you on can drive you mad". Chrystel Egal thus poses the question of limits and commitment: "Room 0 forms a loop. The camera tries to escape from the room but always returns to it. It is impossible to run away from yourself".

Chrystel Egal was born in France in 1963. She is a film maker, photographer and writer. She lives and works in Paris and New-York. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Printemps de Cahors.

Walker Evans
Text printed in the 1958 issue of US Camera Annual, to introduce the photographs of Robert Frank.