LABYRINTH - LES LARMES DE MINOS2017
Lightbox photography, 120 x 80cm Stroboscopic lights, seats Sound installation & composition for 8 speakers, 90' (in collaboration with Jules Wysocki) Produced by Labanque / ADAGP For the exhibition Intériorités, Frédéric D. Oberland surrounds the basement of Labanque art center in Béthune with a large sound installation accompanied by one of his photographs, 'Les Larmes de Minos' / 'The Tears of Minos', which refers to the myth of the Minotaur. 90 minutes of musical strolling divided into eight tableaux and spatialized on a set of eight speakers are building, according to a certain psychogeography, a labyrinthine course. We meet the ghosts of Dante Aliegheri and the Minotaur, stroboscopes and reflections on the river that leads from the known to the unknown. Immersed as if he were in the bowels of the earth, the spectator is invited to experience the murmurings of duration. 2017: Exhibition Intériorités' - 'La Traversée des Inquiétudes' at Labanque art center, Bethune, France 2017: Artist talk with Mathilde Girard at Galerie Escougnou-Cetraro, Paris, France La Traversée des Inquiétudes is a trilogy of exhibitions freely inspired by Georges Bataille and curated by Léa Bismuth. With Bas Jan Ader, Chantal Akerman, Hans Bellmer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Eugène Von Bruenchenhein, Charlotte Charbonnel, Clément Cogitore, Marguerite Duras, Marco Godinho, Oda Jaune, Atsunobu Kohira, Pierre Molinier, Romina De Novellis, Frédéric D. Oberland, Florencia Rodriguez Giles, Anne Laure Sacriste, Markus Schinwald, Pia Rondé, Fabien Saleil, Gilles Stassart, Claire Tabouret, Sabrina Vitali, Daisuke Yokota, Jerome Zonder, Zorro. |
'LABYRINTH' soundtrack out now via NAHAL RECORDINGS imprint -> ORDER VINYL (+exclusive silkscreen print by Atelier Huit Mains) / DIGITAL
'Frédéric D. Oberland is a musician and photographer. An insatiable worker, in ta few years he has formed several groups (including Oiseaux-Tempête, Le Réveil des Tropiques, The Rustle Of The Stars, FareWell Poetry and now FOUDRE!). His musical universe is shaped by images, be there cinematographic, photographic or simply dreamlike: these are often thick and matte, grainy and mysterious; and always inhabited by a night, a black and white full of contrast, from which it originates. With the help of Jules Wysocki, he created a sound labyrinth for the entire basement of Labanque, experimenting with installation in a contemporary art space for the first time. The result is a spatialised form of sound, with many modulations, like a narrative made up of stations, eight chapters in dialogue with the particular architecture of the basements (with the speakers scattered around the old screened goods lift, the safe rooms with their reinforced concrete walls, and the Banque de France archive room furnished with iron lockers).
The voyage is conducive to wandering, choreographed listening and, of course, immersion. This last word is undoubtedly the key to grasping the specificity of this tenebrous undertaking: what we can hear - a 45-minute loop that is both an acoustic experiment and a highly polished musical composition - envelops us: ‘the labyrinth is plunged into darkness. As you wander through the corridors and rooms, you can make out the scattered emergency exits. We are at the heart of a sonic magma made up of whirrs, crackles, murmurs, tinkles, percussive shocks, feedback, snatches of notes, patterns and voices; a musical aggregate, a cocoon of sound that is soft but heartbreaking. It is by drifting - according to a psychogeography of the labyrinth - that the immersed spectator experiences the underground, his eyes and ears turned towards the night, its mystery, its lights, its rustles, its chaos’, describes Oberland. Oberland drew his inspiration from Bataille's L'Expérience intérieure, in particular the section entitled ‘Le Labyrinthe (ou la composition des êtres)’, which states that ‘a man is a particle inserted into unstable and entangled wholes'.
Here we are: at the heart of the journey, forced to lose our bearings, on the river leading from the known to the unknown. The melody is assumed, but as if pierced by uncertainties, so that the phonic crossing of spaces can be rough and battered, or just as harmonious. Minos, in Greek mythology, was the man who locked the Minotaur in Daedalus' labyrinth, and his eyes stare back at us from the light of a photograph presented in a lightbox in the darkness at the heart of the journey. Dante is not far away, and the last song of his Inferno, read in Italian by a female voice, inhabits the space. We could be in a cave or in the bowels of the Earth, and we understand that the Intériorités exhibition, in its very geographical structure, obeys an upward movement, from these basements, this wandering in the vibrating ‘dark forest’ from which the forces come into action, to the top of the building, which is none other than the crater of a volcano.’
Text by Léa Bismuth
The voyage is conducive to wandering, choreographed listening and, of course, immersion. This last word is undoubtedly the key to grasping the specificity of this tenebrous undertaking: what we can hear - a 45-minute loop that is both an acoustic experiment and a highly polished musical composition - envelops us: ‘the labyrinth is plunged into darkness. As you wander through the corridors and rooms, you can make out the scattered emergency exits. We are at the heart of a sonic magma made up of whirrs, crackles, murmurs, tinkles, percussive shocks, feedback, snatches of notes, patterns and voices; a musical aggregate, a cocoon of sound that is soft but heartbreaking. It is by drifting - according to a psychogeography of the labyrinth - that the immersed spectator experiences the underground, his eyes and ears turned towards the night, its mystery, its lights, its rustles, its chaos’, describes Oberland. Oberland drew his inspiration from Bataille's L'Expérience intérieure, in particular the section entitled ‘Le Labyrinthe (ou la composition des êtres)’, which states that ‘a man is a particle inserted into unstable and entangled wholes'.
Here we are: at the heart of the journey, forced to lose our bearings, on the river leading from the known to the unknown. The melody is assumed, but as if pierced by uncertainties, so that the phonic crossing of spaces can be rough and battered, or just as harmonious. Minos, in Greek mythology, was the man who locked the Minotaur in Daedalus' labyrinth, and his eyes stare back at us from the light of a photograph presented in a lightbox in the darkness at the heart of the journey. Dante is not far away, and the last song of his Inferno, read in Italian by a female voice, inhabits the space. We could be in a cave or in the bowels of the Earth, and we understand that the Intériorités exhibition, in its very geographical structure, obeys an upward movement, from these basements, this wandering in the vibrating ‘dark forest’ from which the forces come into action, to the top of the building, which is none other than the crater of a volcano.’
Text by Léa Bismuth
|
|