Continuum @Centre Pompidou Paris
About
« There’s no life on Mars but Mars has never ceased to inspire. A metaphor of otherness. For Continuum Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves has made a film of a sunset on Mars in homage to seminal electronic composer Éliane Radigue (b. 1932). Her immersive installation based on images of the Red Planet taken by NASA probes shows the sun setting for about an hour to the score of Koumé, part III of the musician’s Trilogie de la mort, a piece inspired by the Bardo Thodol, better known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism is the interval between death and rebirth. The Martian landscape realized by Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves goes through different phases of colour, depicting skies progressively turning from orange to blue and into twilight – the reverse of what happens on Earth with a blue sky becoming red. Echoing these monochromatic fields is Éliane Radigue’s minimalist composition, resounding like an on-going deep breath. Continuum is about continuity between different states of consciousness, from being to non-being to being again, over and over, the endless cycle of life and death. Time and space become a dream, like any other sense dissolving into the visual and the sonorous. Continuum plays with the idea of optical and cosmic illusion: on Mars so on Earth, the sun never sets. » Sean Rose, 2019 Video projectors, video simulator, light projectors and double screen 15M x 6M. Collaborators MUSIC COMPOSER : ELIANE RADIGUE Programming: Guillaume Jacquemin Lighting: Remi Godfroy Sound spatialization: Emmanuel Holterbach Producers : STARTS residencies, Les Spectacles vivants - Centre Pompidou. With the support of DICRéAM/CNC, Arcadi Île-de-France, Le Fresnoy (Studio national des arts contemporains). Scientific collaborators : Dr François Forget (LMD/CNRS, France) Dr Dan McLeese (JPL/Caltech, USA) Dr William Rapin (Caltech, USA) Dr Mark Lemmon (Texas A&M University, USA) Photo©Julien Lanoo Executive production : Bureau Olivia SAPPEY