The camera is held at shoulder height.
The first sequence starts on a pedestrian crossing. Boris Achour moves forward in urban space, continuously throwing confetti around him. He follows passers-by in the street, takes up position at the top of a Metro escalator, then wends his way amongst the traffic – throwing confetti all the time.

His action, without being a direct challenge, may seem like a hidden form of provocation, a gentle intrusion into the space of motorists and people in the street.
Most of the passers-by remain stoical, and very few show any emotion at all, apart from a kind of amusement.
At the end of his route, Boris Achour throws his confetti at inanimate objects and forms: a dummy in a shop window, an empty car, a pigeon and some graffiti on a wall.

Following the example of Actions-peu, Confetti gives an awareness of a light and playful intervention in the urban environment, where the action is far from spectacular.
The people that Boris Achour meets in the street do not really respond to his proposition of provoked amusement. The camera has a double role: it inhibits the people being filmed and, at the same time, protects the artist. Confetti is filmed in the street, with a shoulder-held camera that is clearly visible – the process is a means of maintaining a distance between the person filming and the people being filmed.
A shift is created between an established order (the procession of pedestrians in the street) and an action that is removed from its usual context (throwing confetti).

The use of confetti is associated with festive events – popular occasions like carnivals or private celebrations like birthday parties. Boris Achour scrambles the normal circumstances that usually go with the revelry of a public event or the intimate nature of a private party.
What can he be celebrating in that particular place and at that particular time, all alone with his camera?
The answer one is tempted to give is: nothing.

The reason for his action has less to do with a literal interpretation than an ironic shift in view of attempts to take art down into the streets.
As part of the logic of making art less sacred and more available to a widespread public, art shows in the street have become more numerous.
The video, Confetti, almost parodies this manner of involving an unprepared public with a procedure that is both very direct – going into the street to throw confetti over passers-by – and has a result that appears to be sterile – the absence of reaction.

Through the seemingly playful form of a proposition, Boris Achour's work often shows a critical aspect that resists pedagogy and draws its references from contemporary artistic works and practices.

Laetitia Rouiller