Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Stéphanie Roland is a belgian visual artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Roland makes films and installations exploring invisible structures, hyperobjects and deep time; from the ecological and political to the geologic and cosmic.

Complex systems from western societies create, through their functioning, ambiguous zones where confusion between reality and fiction operates. This notion of fiction is central to Stéphanie Roland’s conceptual work. The artist is interested in immaterial, invisible and negative entities generated by our system of which they are an integral part and which they influence. Her work questions the possibilities of the representation of these ghosts of western civilizations. From financial products to phantom islands, and from airline blacklists to deep Web, Stéphanie Roland works on embodying these hidden phenomena of our knowledge in a dialectical interplay between physical presence and immateriality.

While at Headlands

“Drop! Cover! Hold on!” is a hybrid documentary project about the San Andreas Fault, blending reality and fiction, real and virtual worlds, geography and affect. This multi-layered film essay probes invisible terrestrial phenomena, but also more existential human rifts, with the cinematic expectation of a never-ending state of emergency. How do we create new narratives in a post-truth era? Different types of images will be experimented to reflect a complex, fragmented vision of reality. During my residency, I would like to research and create new material for the documentary, immerge myself in a landscape close to this geological feature.