Pauline Curnier Jardin

Born 1980, she lives and works in Berlin.

“From the allegory of the cave as the first philosophical concept to the invention of prehistory as an anthropological body of knowledge, thanks to the cave paintings, from the apparition of the Immaculate Conception to the very metaphor of creation provided by its suggestive forms, which so vividly evoke the human body, from the fear of suffocation that it generates to the shamanic rituals that it hides while at the same time its echo heightens the power of their liberating di-harmonic chants, a cave, indeed any cave, is no doubt one of the places that secretes the greatest number of phylogenic mysteries, a place that seems to contain both the question of our origins and its answer. It is in a cave that we have found the only known traces of humanity’s oldest rituals. These traces, these 30,000 years transform our perception of time into something incredibly vertiginous, a divine emotion. The cave, that viscous, underground gallery, would appear to the locus of a secular cult. This was the hypothesis I started from when I chose to make a film about the cave object, and to have all those aspects embodied and performed, one by one. My film will be a reanimated cave.” – Pauline Curnier Jardin, April 2011