Gaspard Nectoux & Sibylle de Laurens
Residency:
December 1-30, 2021

Gaspard Nectoux is a film critic and researcher from Paris, France. His writings have been published in Cahiers du cinéma, Trafic, Débordements, Études, SoFilm and Images documentaires. His work focuses on film criticism history, recently contributing to the publishing of seminal post-war film critic André Bazin’s complete writings in 2018. Nectoux is currently researching critic/filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette’s writings, and overlooked filmmakers, like EZTV founder John Dorr, on whom he published a monographic essay, Le secret derrière le Dorr, in the spring of 2020. 

Sibylle de Laurens is a researcher, a curator, and a web developer who lives in Paris. Her study of the forms and systems of production involving technological tools started with a research project devoted to the American non-profit “Experiments in Art and Technology”, before focusing on alternative practices such as the one developed at the core of the Guerrilla Television movement. de Laurens is currently working on a website which will give access to the documents and archives she has gathered with Pascaline Morincôme.

Since 2015, Sibylle de Laurens, with colleague Pascaline Morincôme, have led a research project exploring alternative video scenes in the U.S. In 2017, they organized an exhibition devoted to the archives of the Videofreex collective at  the Treize gallery, alongside several evenings, screenings, and lectures in association with The Cheapest University, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and the Parsons School of Art and Design. The following  year, they started the Seedy Films cycle, a program focused on the links  between filmed and printed forms, hosted at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the  Centre Georges Pompidou.

In 2019, Seedy Films focused on the archives of Los Angeles independent space EZTV. The one-year program included a talk with EZTV directors Kate Johnson and Michael Masucci, the presentation of a selection of EZTV archives preserved both at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Library and at the 18th Street Arts Center, and several screenings from the EZTV catalog. In collaboration with Gaspard Nectoux’s own research on EZTV founder John Dorr’s video making and film writings, a screening of Dorr’s third feature, Dorothy and Alan at Norma Place, was organized in April 2019 at the Pompidou, and followed by a February 2020 screening of Dorr’s final feature, Approaching Omega, at the Archipel theater in Paris. Sharing a common and complementary interest in the EZTV archives, the three scholars are now working collectively on documenting the history and production catalog of the structure of EZTV.