Poppies and Sailboats (2001)

Rose Lowder (France) is a filmmaker, author, and film curator born in Lima, Peru, in 1941. Her practice is grounded in her interest in radical architecture, colour theory, and the landscapes of her adoptive home in the south of France. She has made more than 60 films, remarkable for their meticulous frame-by-frame composition and self-reliant production methods; equally notable is the artist’s commitment to artistic creation as an ecological practice and her lifelong collecting and championing of noncommercial cinema through her curatorial and critical work. Lowder studied painting and sculpture at several schools in Peru and later at Chelsea School of Art in London, eventually (at the invitation of Jean Rouch) submitting her PhD to Université Paris-X (now Université Paris Nanterre) in 1977. Her films have screened at venues worldwide, including nine previous editions of Media City Film Festival, with important solo screenings held recently at Tate Modern, REDCAT, and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, among others. Lowder worked with Groucho Marx and as a film editor for BBC in London in the 1960s, taught film aesthetics, theory, and practice at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris from 1996–2005, and co-founded Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA) in 1981 with the aim of acquiring prints and bibliographic documents of artistic cinema. Through AFEA she published several books, including The Visual Aspect: Canadian Experimental Films (1991), L’image en mouvement (2002), and Images/discours (2006). The illustrative monograph Bouquets 11-20: Notebooks by Rose Lowder was published by Visual Studies Workshop in 2018. She lives and works between Avignon and Paris.