Gabriel Abrantes

Blaise Adilon

Venue

Usines Fagor

Lyon

Born 1984 in North Carolina, USA.
Lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

A fan of animation, from the Fleischer brothers’ first experiments with rotoscoping through to Pixar’s animated movies, Gabriel Abrantes makes films with a variety of techniques – from filming in real-life conditions to using computer-generated images. The film – inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, The Fir Tree, about a tree that wants to be cut down, taken from the forest and turned into a Christmas tree – features a sculpture that, weary of being a mundane architectural ornament, decides to escape from the Louvre Museum and explore the streets of Paris. Amusing and critical in equal measure, The Marvelous Misadventures of the Stone Lady acts as the metaphor of an artistic practice intent on shrugging off institutional constraints and engaging politically with the so-called real world.