MEMENTO is a musical cycle that summons natural materials (leaves, stones, wood, sand, water, grass) and materials (metals, glass, wool, coal) and questions their power to become music or otherwise a meaningful sound. The music, at the beginning exclusively acoustic and instrumental, is little by little won by sounds which emanate from natural materials that an instrumentalist-performer manipulates on the stage and amplified by a particular microphony. These sounds, half concrete, half electronic, first appear as interludes and then gradually permeate the music itself.

The cycle involves 7 musicians, 1 percussionist-performer of electronic music and 1 conductor for the last two pieces of the cycle. MEMENTO is a set of 6 pieces, each one calling for a different instrumental formation.

The cycle refers to the plastic universes of Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, Claudio Parmiggiani, Richard Long, to this art that tries to measure a "gap": the one that separates nature and the artistic gesture, the material and its manufacture or transformation, the one that separates natural phenomena (fire, erosion) and human action (sculpting, digging, breaking, disposing), the one that separates nature from the places where art takes place. In a way, what unites the practices of these artists (and of many others) would be the attempt, necessarily a little vain, to measure with the yardstick of a geological time the meager time of the man.

The works referred to in the cycle are often in between: halfway between sculpture and installation, performance and painting, scenography and hanging.

Mentions
Biography(s)
MEMENTO
Jérôme Combier
Residence
Wed. May 17 + 18, 2023
Sat. 20 -- Mon. May 29, 2023
Tue. August 29 -- Fri. September 1, 2023
Distribution

Corentin Marillier
percussion

Cédric Jullion
flute (also piccolo, alto flute and bass flute)

Maroussia Gentet
piano

Ayumi Mori
clarinet (also bass clarinet)

André Feydy
trumpet

Fanny Vicens
accordion

Constance Ronzatti
violin

Guillaume Bourgogne
direction