Ectoplasme is a performance by Vir Andres Hera and Kama La Mackerel, presented on March 28, 2024 at La Chapelle de l’ENSA Bourges, as part of the exhibition La Box – A First History (1990–2024).

Ectoplasme emerges from an ongoing correspondence between Hera and La Mackerel. Fragmented by design, the performance navigates language, love, multiple belongings, and diasporic circulation. Their dialogue began during a shared research residency at Dare-Dare in Montreal and later took shape through a publication written by Kama La Mackerel around their encounter. Since then, their exchanges have unfolded across Mauritius, Mexico, and Montreal, before finally materializing in physical presence through La Box’s invitation.

At the core of Ectoplasme is a live gesture of re-editing: film material is remounted in real time, producing a performative montage where voice, projection, and bodily presence continuously reshape one another. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, the work treats cinema as a mutable surface, activated through speech, listening, and temporal drift. This live reconfiguration of images operates as a plastic experiment on the performativity of film: cinema becomes something that happens, rather than something that is shown.

The performance was developed in dialogue with Eric Bullot and Arnaud Deshayes, professors at ENSAD, with whom Vir Andres Hera conducted pedagogical modules during the residency at La Box. These conversations informed the structural approach of Ectoplasme, particularly its attention to live editing, feedback, and the instability of cinematic form.

Visually and sonically, the piece oscillates between intimacy and projection. Kama La Mackerel reads and sings into the space while Hera manipulates video in real time, allowing fragments of earlier journeys to surface, dissolve, and reassemble. Images of bodies, landscapes, and gestures circulate across multiple screens, producing layered temporalities where memory is never fixed and meaning remains in motion.

The dialogue between Hera and La Mackerel is rooted in shared lived experience: migration, queer kinship, artistic survival, and the slow construction of trust across distance. Ectoplasme does not seek resolution. Instead, it holds space for resonance, for foreign words acquiring familiar accents, and for affection to travel through screens, archives, and voices.

The performance proposes cinema as a relational practice, where editing becomes choreography and correspondence becomes material. Ectoplasme operates as a porous zone between film, poetry, and presence, staging connection as something fragile, ongoing, and collectively authored.

The performance was followed by sound performances by David Maranha and Katya Shirshkov at Palais Jacques Cœur, extending the evening into a shared acoustic space.