Baïnes

Baïnes is the first piece in my cycle Il libro di oggetti alterati – the book of altered objects, written during my residency at the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis.

Through this cycle, I am pursuing my research into dialogue with other forms of artistic expression, and the aesthetic tensions this can generate.

Baïnes uses silent videos by artist Jennifer Douzenel as temporal and rhythmic material in a labyrinthine sequence in which musical and visual objects respond to and resonate with each other. This form is also inspired by the Volodinian concept of Narrats, as a series of snapshots that “fix a situation, emotions, a vibrant conflict between memory and reality, between the imaginary and the real”.

Jennifer Douzenel’s approach struck a deep chord with me because of the possible convergences with my work. She conceives her videos as moments of reality reduced to the frame of a single fixed shot, in a continuous tracking of ephemeral suspended moments where reality is transfigured. The plastic dimension of my musical language, based on the tension between objects, conceals the potential for striking echoes. In my music, the development of a narrative akin to sound design gives silence a singular place, making it a genuine point of connection between sounds and images. This avoids any kind of illustrative relationship, with only a few musical “overflows” on the image, or visual “overflows” on the music, appearing as formal, structuring markers.

The musical writing of Baïnes also raises the question of the object and its framework: it does not seek to make the music coincide with the visual and poetic coincidences captured in the four corners of the world by Jennifer Douzenel. The music has been conceived by de-coincidence, to use François Jullien’s concept, and can be performed without the video projections, from which it will retain an existential memory.

Aurélien Dumont