Peau de vache (2021 – In process)

Peau de vache is an ongoing film and installation project by Nathalie Rey and Enric Maurí. It unfolds between autobiography, myth, and poetic realism. Conceived as a feature-length film and expanded into an installation, the project navigates the porous boundaries between the real and the magical, the intimate and the universal.

Rooted in personal memories and family ties, the narrative emerges from the artists’ intertwined experiences: Nathalie’s childhood on her grandmother’s island in northern France, and Enric’s early encounters with rural life and the act of milking cows. The film’s title and central motif refer to three cowhides inherited by Nathalie from her grandmother upon the sale of her family home — relics that carry traces of care, labor, and inheritance.

Drawing inspiration from The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), Peau d’Âne (Jacques Demy, 1970), and The Demon’s Brain (Agnieszka Polska, 2018), Peau de vache situates the mystical and the mundane on the same plane. It contemplates the passage from the city to nature, life to death, human to animal, in a language where fable and autobiography mirror one another.

The project embraces what might be called a refractive practice — cinema as a means to think through the world, rather than reflect it. This approach reframes subjectivity as a poetic inquiry, a living inventory of cinematic perceptions. Within this framework, the “self” becomes both the narrator and the medium, an embodied enunciator constructing its own fable.