Marine Hugonnier’s (1969) work is constructed around notions of “instant” and “interlude”; in an intuitive way it grasps the complexity of reality and its emotional resources. Talking with Florence Durieux about Impact, Marine Hugonnier refers to the T moment “when reality is always an emotive charge”. Hyper-realism, she explains, is “always charged with an odd ambiguity because reality suddenly seems as familiar as it is strange. The mixture of genres, documentary and fiction, gives rise to this kind of discrepancy”.

Shot during an accident prevention campaign in a French town, the artist took advantage of a simulated car crash to film the reactions of the people present on the spot, who were unaware that they were looking at a set-up. The work thus mixes true and false; it contains its share of reality and its share of fiction. The film is edited in such a way that a mental reconstruction of the event is necessary. The black frames between the shots are as much interludes that help to create links, as they are a space of subjectivity, a door leading to “the T moment”.