Charlotte Gillain

Some Things Last a Long Time zooms in on how we walk through life, and what we carry with us along the way.

Charlotte Gillain is an Amsterdam-based performer and maker working at the intersection of mime, film and technology. After a brief year at the BA Artisteducater in Dance at ArtEZ, she graduated from the Mime School in Amsterdam in 2021. Her work explores themes of transformation and often takes on an atmospheric, ambiguous, and subtly unsettling quality. With a strong interest in experimentation, she integrates tools such as deepfake, motion capture, and 3D-scanning, always grounding her research in the physical experience of both performers and audience.

Some Things Last a Long Time is a work-in-progress about memory, the subconscious, and the act of walking through life. The project began from a fascination with how experiences quietly settle in us—the places, sounds, and moments we carry without noticing, and the limited access we have to this inner archive. Early in the research, I started collecting my own place-based memories, for example: all the commute-routes I walked, ceilings I woke up under, old mp3 files, train stations i've waited... This created a space between documentary practice and the messy, nonlinear ways we actually remember. When placed together, these ordinary moments/places reveal their weight. They gather into a landscape—an archive that shapes us even when we have limited access to it.

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