Supra Strata

The studio photograph shows how much construction goes into the view. Printed foliage hangs in separate planes, surrounded by metal stands, ladders, cables, and lights. From the camera’s position, these flat pieces line up to give the landscape its depth. Seen from the side, there are narrow gaps between them and open space where the finished image suggests dense vegetation.

Goudal’s retoucher is also an optical engineer, who calculates the scale of the backdrops. Her longstanding cinematographer, Julien Malichier, helps build the sets as well as film them. In a conversation on the podcast Compelling, she describes how much of her work depends on this small, established team.

Goudal was already building landscapes for the camera in her early photographs. In Cascade (2009), she arranged protective plastic sheeting in a wood to resemble a waterfall. She later recalled spending two days there with a friend and becoming unsure whether the picture worked. A man arrived with his children and asked what they were doing on his land. When she showed them the photograph, the children immediately recognised a waterfall.

Her interest in geological time developed after seeing La Glace et le Ciel, Luc Jacquet’s 2015 documentary about the glaciologist Claude Lorius. She was struck by the ice cores: drilling deeper meant reaching further into the past. She went on to experiment with paper that dissolved and sets that came apart, revealing another image behind them.

Supra Strata draws more specifically on stratigraphy, the study of rock layers, and on plastiglomerates. In 2014, geologist Patricia Corcoran, marine researcher Charles Moore, and artist Kelly Jazvac described examples from Kamilo Beach in Hawai‘i: melted plastic binding together rock, sand, and other debris. They proposed that these mixtures could survive in the geological record. The plastic objects we use and discard might eventually be identifiable within a new kind of stone.

She describes the film as a passage from night towards daylight, with brighter images appearing as the darker foregrounds dissolve.

The soundtrack is made afterwards. Goudal’s shoots are full of activity and people calling to one another, so their live sound would tell a very different story. Working with a sound specialist, she can make a light surface seem heavy or give a falling fragment more force than it had in the studio.

Chloé Thévenin contributed the music for Supra Strata. For its 2024 Centre Pompidou presentation, Thibaut Javoy made a quadriphonic mix, distributing the sound across four channels.

Goudal connects the vertical format with painting and the movement of water through a landscape. In the Pompidou installation, the projection stands close to the floor, with a bench facing it.