Christian Helgi is a French and Icelandic photographer, filmmaker and musician.
After studying photojournalism and African Studies at Sciences Po Paris, he worked for Arte and France 24 in Ivory Coast, and then for Are We Europe for several projects in Armenia, Moldova, Greenland, Rwanda and Kenya.
He also studied at Edim music school in Paris, and photography, music and fine arts in South Africa. He performed with the Jazz Band of the University of Stellenbosch and discovered music technology technics, that he investigated in depth at City University in London and by living in the artistic neighborhood of Hackney Wick in East London.
His visual mind grew as a child by drawing and painting bande dessinées. It taught him the sense of framing characters, storytelling, colors, texture and movements. It was therefore easy for him to embrace photography.
Helgi adopts a documentary approach to photography, focused on people. He started with street photography in Cape Town, and then worked for NGOs, theater companies, music bands, film productions.
With Are We Europe, he participated to the creation of multimedia stories in Moldova - nominated to the European Press Prize, and in Armenia, where he taught photography and filmaking to armenian journalists. Helgi also filmed and recorded the AWE Live Sessions at Eurosonic Festival in the Netherlands.
With the duo Kokto, he made 10 music video clips.
Helgi started to work with blues/folk singer Morjane Ténéré during the summer of 2021 with concerts in France and Switzerlands. They got a grant for a residency at the Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture in the fall of 2021, where they gave concerts, filmed live sessions, met local artists and made the EP cover of birth.
In the winter 2022, Helgi & Morjane stayed in residency at Maison Matrice in Switzerland, with Franco-Armenian singer Kaya, in order to film her videoclip, record her EP and play concerts.
In December 2021, Helgi joined the "Nordic Remix” program in Sisimiut in Greenland, produced by Are We Europe and Arctic Sound Festival, with 5 other nordic artists from Sweden, Danmark, Norway and Greenland.
Helgi worked over the summer 2022 in the arctic as a photographer on an expedition boat, from Greenland’s East Fjords to Labrador and NewFoundland.
On the side of these projects, Helgi works as director and director of photography on short-films, for television, and as freelance photographer and music producer, especially for theater companies. Helgi also works as a mountain guide-photo teacher in Iceland’s highlands.
Today, Helgi keeps on playing with Morjane Ténéré and Kaya Kasper on stage all over Europe, behind the camera and in the studio. He is working on his first photobook and photography exhibition. And on his musical-visual project Ljós.
Contact : christianhelgibeaussier@gmail.com
