“They are the first image on the wall of our first dreams. Someday, animals, held prisoners, humiliated, domesticated by human beings, will go far away from us to live again like in the very first time of the world: the Wild Fest”.

Zoo[trope] images consist of film sequences from animal documentaries reworked in the laboratory on a black & white film “high-contrast”, so as to retain the shape of animals and to remove the rectangular profile of the screen. Once projected, they appear as cut out silhouettes of a shadows theater, a return to the ancient origin of cinema: the appearance of forms on a white surface and the zoetrope (pre-cinematic apparatus). With this performance, Nominoë organizes an open space where the screen, the projectors and the viewers see their roles and relationships displaced and redistributed.
The projectionists as the viewers are located on both sides of a screen defining a permeable border; the same images sequence is projected in different compositions and the transparency of the screen reveals the images on either side. Viewers perceive the same reasons, symmetrically reversed / mirrored. There is neither before nor behind, the screen appears as an invisible boundary marking an area so rich in multiple exchanges. The course of the film consists of a series of “animal pictures”, alternating feline (lynx, tiger, puma) and birds (ibis, raptor, flamingo, owl) in a spatial editing based on the pattern repetition and emphasising on layering and changes of scale, the juxtaposition and the reports of homothety that follow different combinations. So the screen appears as a horizon on which these animal figures are deposited or faded, enigmatic entities disquieting or soothing. Palimpsestique presences, distant and familiar, evoking memories of the first animals representations.
The soundtrack consists of a mix of multiple environmental sounds and extracts of animal documentaries. It offers a discursive comment the images playing on a synchronous rebuilt (animal sounds, sounds of nature) as well as on instrumental digressions (trumpet, flute, gong, African rhythms). It also marks the changes of sequences, establishes limits and climax, make transitions within the sequential cutting. The film in effect unfolds as an illustrated book of images boards whose sequence - sometimes punctuated by the presence of a soft man’s voice repeating: “Listen well!” and “Look well!” - reminds to the spectators the phantasmagorias and the projections fairs animated by the presence of the barker.