The Host and the Cloud takes place in the disused spaces of the former National Museum of Folk Arts and Traditions, nestled in the Bois de Boulogne. This venue, stripped of its collections, becomes the setting for an unscripted ritual: actors and museum staff are subjected to unpredictable situations — hypnosis sessions, black masses… — allowing the process to unfold organically and uncontrollably.
The participants’ faces are concealed beneath LED masks, a device that blurs identity and transforms each presence into an anonymous, almost spectral figure. At the heart of the film wanders a 3D-animated white rabbit, the avatar of a mysterious and absent ‘host’, whose unconscious the film attempts to map.
The Host and the Cloud is very much in keeping with the approach of Pierre Huyghe, an artist fascinated by ‘cultural biotopes’ — those autonomous systems where events generate themselves, as seen in Untilled (2012). The film extends his exploration of the blurring of reality and fiction, the dissolution of the author, and the active role of the viewer in the construction of meaning.
