L’Alien

L’Alien project is composed of four pieces : the role play L’Alien, the website Le blog de la classe de Fraïssé, the mockumentary alien.doc and the video series Atterrissages.

In January 2019, I immersed pupils from a primary school class in Aude in a life-size role-playing game L’Alien during a residency conducted as part of Création en cours, a national programme supporting emerging artists run by Les Ateliers Médicis.

During the six months of my intervention, the children of this remote village conducted an investigation into the disappearance of a ufologist, made contact with an alien, and participated in the defence of an asylum seeker. Week after week, I staged this role-playing game, paying close attention to every detail. The aim was not so much to create an illusion as to allow these children, aged between 7 and 10, to enter my story and experience each twist and turn intensely.

Throughout my speech, I fuelled Le blog de la classe de Fraïssé with videos filmed in class, interviews with pupils and photos of clues gathered to retrace this exciting adventure.

In January 2020, I was awarded the Création en Cours Special Jury Prize, granting me a budget to continue this project. I therefore worked on the realisation of alien.doc, a short film aiming to retrace this epic journey. But instead of considering this film as a reconstruction, I imagined a mockumentary; this film genre seemed ideal to me for transposing the disturbing mix of real and fictional elements that constitute the DNA of L’Alien.

In March 2025, I reactivate the Alien project with Atterrissages, a series of videos made during workshops in schools in the Jura region. Six years after the events in the Aude region, alien spacecraft landings have multiplied in the Jura mountains. The pilot episode, made with pupils from the Lajoux class, shows the distress of the aliens exposed to the cold in the makeshift shanty town in their village. Each video in this series concludes with a new issue, inviting another class to think about how the aliens could be helped.