Nicolas Brault

Multi-award winning animation filmmaker and Associate Professor, Nicolas Brault is Director of the École d'art at Université Laval, in Québec City, Canada. In 2000, he won the NFB's Cinéaste recherché(e) competition, leading to “Antagonia“ (2002), awarded at CINANIMA. He then explored Inuit culture with Islet (2003), African oral “Traditions with Hungu“ (2008), and “The Circus“ (2011), nominated for Best Animated Film at the César Awards. Since 2012, he has developed a series of short non-narrative films around the human body. “Foreign Bodies“ (2013) won the Off-Limits Award at “Annecy, and Squame“ (2015) received several distinctions, including Best Experimental Film at “MONSTRA“ (2017). “Mémoire entropique“ went on to receive the Golden Zagreb Award at Animafest Zagreb (2024) and the Jury Award for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at Vienna Shorts (2025). He is currently developing a new series centred on the motif of the storm.

Rooted in the motif of the storm, the MuseumsQuartier residency marks the formal starting point of “Recipes for a Forecast Storm,“ an experimental animation project conceived as both a film and a gallery installation, proposing to reconstitute the storm through macro-photographic sequences, frame by frame.

The project develops atmospheric recipes — polyurethane foam for cloud convection, ferrofluid for the mesocyclone, supercooled sodium thiosulfate for snow crystals, cymatics for the shockwave of thunder. Each material is selected for its intrinsic properties: thermal, chemical, magnetic. This slow indexing of the real, gesture by gesture, frame by frame, follows the thinking of Alva Noë (The Entanglement, 2023): art as an active reorganization of experience rather than a passive representation of the world. Informed by animist philosophies in which natural forces are active presences rathe

The first experiments will be conducted at MQ and exhibited at ASIFAkeil during the Vienna Shorts Festival. The storm isn't out there—it is here.