A View from the Cliff

A View from the Cliff is the first solo exhibition of artist and director Anouk Chambaz (*1993, Lausanne), showing the homonymous film for the first time to the public. The research for this work began in 2017 with the artist’s first trip to Étretat, in Normandy, while the last shots were made recently in the summer of 2020. With this film, Chambaz promotes a gaze towards the world at the margins of anthropocentrism, which questions the centrality of humans moving closer to what surrounds us, be it something abiotic, like the cliff or animal, like seagulls. With the publication of an interview journal, the exhibition shows an in-depth presentation of Chambaz’s long research relating to Étretat’s cliffs, geological time, and extinction processes. Cyanotypes, taken from the film and realised with exposure to natural light, give instead an intimate glimpse of the sea, which is both disturbing and distant, like a mass of water on which much of life on Earth depends.