Irvin Anneix

Irvin Anneix is a video artist who lives and works in France. He makes documentary films distributed in the form of web series on social media and through video shows in cultural installations and theatres. Anneix seeks to give voice to those who are rarely heard in traditional media: seniors, adolescents, people living in deprived neighbourhoods or rural areas, and those facing multiple forms of discrimination.

He is interested in subjects related to intimacy, identity, the body, sexuality, family history and transmission. He develops a unique creative process using social media: casting, building virtual communities, online training and support, self-filming, etc. Anneix sets out a creative framework but then takes a back seat in the process to allow relationships among equals to flourish, to give participants the freedom to embrace an idea and express their own creativity. In his first project, Mots d’ados, he spent five years collecting narratives, virtual and handwritten diaries of adolescents, which he then had other teens read out loud in a mobile recording booth that travelled around France. The work was first presented at Centre Pompidou in Paris, in 2016.

He is currently working on two co-productions addressing the question of transitions in adolescence. In Extra—filtres, he invites teenagers to rethink the stereotypes around bodies and gender on social media. Then, he turns to questions of generational transitions in Objets — Relais, asking young people to bring to school an object from their ancestors, and explain it. The object is scanned in 3D and the talk is recorded, allowing the teenager to play an active part in family history, while learning about world history at the same time.

Like a mirror on our society, Irvin Anneix’s works constitute a sociology of today’s youth. They send a message of truth and open expression, documenting adolescence from the inside, far from the clichés we might have about that age group.