Alessandra Jeanneret

Alessandra is an American/Swiss filmmaker, video artist and cinematographer. Passionate about understanding the human psyche, Alessandra’s practice seeks to find meaning to our actions and emotions as individuals, to question their origins and cycles throughout time and societal crises.

Since graduating with a BA in Film from the Lausanne University of Art and Design in 2018, Alessandra’s moving image works have gently strayed away from conventional filmmaking to focus on creating single-channel video installation works that draw their sources from philosophy, psychology and literature. Her films weave together documentary, archival and experimental genres into unique individual experiences.

Today, much like in any crisis, we, as a society and as individuals stand at a crossroads, our hearts filled with anxiety as we move in a space in-between. Between a known world that is collapsing and a new one that is unknown, blurry and uncertain. As daunting the experience of anxiety may be, we often forget that, like other ‘’darker’’ emotions, anxiety acts as a signal of deeper internal change or anticipation of said change.

If anxiety could be a key to understanding our internal movements, then why run away from it? Why not delve into it? Why not try and understand it?

Alessandra’s graduate work Reflections on the Nature of Anxiety offers a journey for the individual viewer, into the meanings and manifestations of anxiety. Collecting answers from children, existentialism, psychoanalysis and modern philosophy, her moving image installation investigates the emotions and perceptions anxiety inflicts on the mind and what existential questions it may trigger about self-perception and human purpose, from the experience of birth to political uprisings.

Reflections on the Nature of Anxiety (film excerpts)

Reflections on the Nature of Anxiety (film teaser)

Interaction with the installation (viewer slips inside)

Reflections on the Nature of Anxiety (screening booth)

Projection of the film for the individual viewer inside the installation

Reflections on the Nature of Anxiety is conceived as 10-minute film and soundtrack that will be shown on a round screen above the head of the viewer, as they lie down inside the installation. Once the viewer is inside, the booth remains closed and hermetic to light during the screening of the film.The installation itself is designed as a large black box that only fits one person.