VESTIGES DU FUTUR - VESTIGES OF THE FUTURE
Super8 films & 35mm photographs
Immersive exhibition with projections onto various surfaces, prints on veils & tarps, seats Sound installation & musical composition for 7 speakers + 1 subwoofer, 54' 2026 April 30th -> June 14th: premiered at Fotografia Europea festival, Chiostri di San Pietro, curated by luce Lebart, Reggio Emilia, Italia With Vestiges of the Future, Frédéric D. Oberland presents a site-specific installation that interrogates how images of the past haunt both our present and our fantasized visions of the future, whether desirable or apocalyptic. Images persist, mutate, and return in altered forms, speaking simultaneously of our world and of possible premonitions, as if each fragment contained the echo of a collapse or rebirth to come. From them emerge flashes and constellations of sensation: fleeting moments, stars streaking over the sea, ruins of modern civilization, bodies circling the flames, searching hands, surveillance eyes, uprisings, silhouettes of humans and animals merging. Such apparitions compose a sensitive landscape where life stands alongside threat. The visitor is drawn into a labyrinthine journey, wandering through the space and encountering flickering Super8 projections, printed analogue photographs appearing like stations along the way, and a sound installation across eight speakers directed toward the body. From these dispersed sources emerge voices of poets, textures, and musical compositions that murmur and orchestrate these premonitions, circulating like invisible presences. Oberland’s music unolds as long, suspended vibrations between memory and imagination, stretching, accumulating, and breaking open, echoing geological rhythms and collective urgencies. His visual language is shaped by grainy, poetic gestures tracing fragile temporalities and overexposures, resonating with the impermanence of sound. Psychedelic color grading applied directly onto the negative creates kaleidoscopic images in which bodies, landscapes, and rituals dissolve into ephemeral chromatic traces, ghostly remnants of movement and memory. The audience moves within a field of shifting intensities, guided as much by sound as by light. This exhibition extends the artist’s first eponymous book to be published by Sun/Sun Editions. "Super8 film fragments, night-time photographs and musical compositions come together to form an unstable world, suffused with color and tremors. Evanescent figures, landscapes scorched by light, film perforations, crackling sounds. Chaos lies just beneath the surface, yet it feels like the promise of a possible revelation. At the heart of Vestiges du Futur, the images arise from wanderings and captures on film. Long exposure times, blurring and, here too, the grain of the images cause forms to waver: silhouettes dissolve and places lose their identity. “What interests me,” explains artist and musician Frédéric D. Oberland, “is that there is a sort of tremor in reality, where fiction manifests itself without us seeking it.” The image thus occupies an uncertain space, between documentary and hallucinatory vision. These fragments gradually form a vast body of work, conceived as “a labyrinth whose exit lies at the center”. Landscapes, cities and demonstrations become elements of a psychogeographical territory, “where black is light and night is day”. Within this visual material, film and analogue technologies appear as relics of an audiovisual imagination on the verge of obsolescence. Caged animals, crowds surrounded by police, urban machinery or solitary antennas sketch out a present marked by political tension and surveillance.. But these visions also convey the idea of resistance. In this vibrating world, what Oberland calls the ‘victory of the invisible’ sometimes emerges. The images then become the site of a fragile struggle, where past and future merge. ‘My images are out of place… the past and the future come together; it could be tomorrow.’ Here, the present appears as a field haunted by traces, memories and possibilities." — Luce Lebart "Frédéric D Oberland’s multi-sensory practice sees experimental photography, film and music continually feed one another. His grainy photographs, poetic observational gestures and Super8 film explore fragile temporalities. This work captures the sensation of a close call; the flash where life appears all at once, as a flood of hallucinated visions in a trembling world. A quantum space and time inhabited by ghosts" — The Guardian (UK) "L'opera esplora la percezione del pericolo e la fragilità dell'attimo, restituendo l'idea di un mondo in costante vibrazione. Attraverso una poetica dello sguardo che oscilla tra il ricordo di ciò che è accaduto e l'incertezza di ciò che sta per manifestarsi, Oberland invita a riflettere sulla transitorietà dell'esistenza. L'intero allestimento si configura come una sorta di fluttuazione quantica, dove le tracce visive appaiono e svaniscono, conducendo il pubblico in una dimensione allucinata in cui la realtà quotidiana si dissolve per lasciare spazio a un'esplorazione profonda e silenziosa dei confini del tempo.." — Ideanet (IT) |
All films and photographs shot, edited & colorgraded by Frédéric D. Oberland
Super8 film processing and scanning by Grégory Dargent
Help with engravment and enlarging framed images by Romain Barbot
Scenography by Francesca Tagliavini
Original texts & voices by Alexei Perry Cox, Anir Xuxie, Christophe Manon, Efthimis Filippou, G.W. Sok, Léa Bismuth, Mathilde Girard & Raja Salim
Guest musicians: Ben Shemie, Gaspar Claus, Jessica Moss, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Sébastien Forrester
Recorded with the help of Camille Jamain & Radwan Ghazi Moumneh
Thanks to Céline Pévrier, Francesco Colombelli, Matilde Barbieri and the Fotografia Europea technical team.