Tropical Resort was created through the combination of 2 paths. A chimera between performance and video art.

A cinema of the real, where the fiction of everyday life and intimacy weaves different systems of possible narratives between sound and image. A new language emerges as the story unfolds. An invitation to a journey through which the character transfigures. Tropical Resort is not an environmental pamphlet but questions the viewer’s consumption patterns. Activism escapes Manichaeism and reinvents itself in a poetics of the “self” and the other. A balancing act that never stops renewing itself. Until it germinates in this curatorial project. A beach bar? A zoo? A new failure of exoticism?

Around this failure, a new narrative is woven. That of the “Spectacle,” of those who are put on display. More than a variation of the film, the exhibition maps the psyche of the protagonist until the moment of rupture.

More than a simple record of reality, this first part lays the foundations of the film’s aesthetics and our investigation: an ironic self-critique of Western ethnocentrism and our modes of consumption, particularly the consumption of entertainment and spectacle. Christophe, the protagonist (and co-director), wanders through the ruins of his own exotic illusions, themselves staged by mass tourism. The exhibition marks a pause, a deepening of the investigation, and a preparation for the shooting of the second part.

Tropical Resort is a summer love story. Sweet and bitter.

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Alice Bachmann and Christophe Dos Santos were born in Lyon in 1992. Respectively, they graduated from the Fine Arts schools in Brest and Grenoble. Alice Bachmann obtained a master’s degree in cinema and video from the Brera Academy and a second master’s degree in sound arts in Milan. After working with the Marte collective in Buenos Aires, Christophe Dos Santos joined the Maumaus program in Lisbon, where he currently resides. Both have participated in various exhibitions and cultural projects. A.B and C.D developed a common interest in documentary cinema and created their first film in 2020: “Athènes Plage.” Their practice is oriented towards a cinema of reality, where the fiction of everyday life and the intimate intertwine with various possible narrative systems between sound and image. A poetic drift between fiction and reality, juggling visual, sound, and performative arts. Hybrid forms of expression that take them to the ends of the earth. A brutal and naive aesthetic. Laughter. A bit.