Passifolia

2020

20x15x10m

Automated lights, haze machines, ultra-directional speakers, loud speakers, electronics, computers.

Nicolas Guichard & Béatrice Lartigue - Lab212

Vertical light beams cut through space. Emptiness is the condition of their appearance, the matter in which they take form. It is precisely because it is uninhabited that it can be traversed, disturbed, rendered sensible.

By touching a light beam, it opens and releases a bird song just above the visitor. The gesture becomes a threshold: it activates a presence that did not exist, conjures a world from a single point of contact.

The visitor feels the warmth of the light on their skin, and a gentle sound environment envelops them. Light waves and sound waves summon the body in its entirety of perception.

What seemed absent reveals itself as latent... When the sound ends, the beam closes gently: absence returns, but it is no longer quite the same.

Passifolia is an installation made up of 16 interactive modules set organically throughout the space. Each module is composed of a motorised light fixture, an ultra-directional speaker and a detection system. A gentle, evolving soundscape is diffused around the entire periphery of the room.

The musical composition is created especially for the work by Chapelier Fou.

Hundreds of sounds of birds, squirrels, frogs and more, recorded in the wild by a naturalist guide, are arranged to create a fictional and unfinished ecosystem, endlessly recomposed by the presence and movement of visitors.

Hermès

Jonathan Blanchet & Tobias Muthesius - Lab212, Nicolas Nolibos

Chapelier Fou

Mathieu Cabanes

Baptiste Pohoski

Hervé Sauvage

Marc Namblard

Virginia Malucelli, Sophie Toporkoff, Aurélie Veyre

Yannick Royo