Le Jester dans la Vallée, the third in Béna’s series of animated videos featuring her virtual alter ego, the Jester, is set in a natural environment. Reduced to insect size and fitted with dragonfly wings, the Jester, in a reminder of Alice in Wonderland, finds himself face to face with a strange insect pushing a ball of excrement: a so-called dung beetle.
The smell emanating from the ball of dung moved by this Sisyphus of insects is so unpleasant to the Jester that it becomes the subject of a discussion around humans’ total dependence on plants and their gaseous excretions, culminating in the conclusion that we
can only live off the lives of others.True to his nature, the Jester lets himself be guided and ‘instructed’ or ‘informed’ by others – in this case a dung beetle, mycelium 3 , matsutake mushrooms 4 , a tree and a blob. The video explores a series of concepts, including smell as a link to the past and a cohesive force in the present, bodies and fluid worlds, contamination as a necessary means for the
production of diversity, and the ability to adapt to change as the basis of survival. Above all, it revolves around collective forces and collaboration, around the different forms of life and the ways in which they are connected.

Art direction: Sybil Montet
Sound design: Omar El-Sadek

Co-produced for the exhibition by the CEAAC and Julie Béna with support through the CNC’s DICRéAM scheme.