Nuages
1996 (08’00”)
Video: Marie-Jo Lafontaine
The music ‘Nuages’ was created after the completion of the video film of the same name by the Belgian video artist Marie-Jo Lafontaine. This work assignment, as well as the poetic, dramatic design of the film, the story of the clouds is told, allowed a composition that on the one hand emphasizes the visual narrative, but on the other hand has its own musical action.
Some arcs of tension: the chirping and fluttering of the birds, who in the rising unrest anticipate the impending storm; the wind that rises to hurricane gusts; the fragments of music, among others by José Joaquim Emérico Lobo de Mesquita from the Brazilian Baroque period or by the contemporary composer Toru Takemitsu (died 1996), accompany the natural events in a calming or excitable way.
“While the demonic but at the same time, divinely purifying quality of the element fire played an prominent role in Lafontaine’s installation Jeder Engel ist schrecklich (1992), the element air is central to this new installation, specially made for the World Wide Video Festival. Together, they seem to symbolize the extremes of hell and heaven. The heavy, suffocating enclosure of Jeder Engel … makes room for a light, liberating, ecstatic upward view in Ivre d’éternite. Hanging free in the space and running diagonally upwards, there is a large conical tube of polished aluminium as a supra human instrument. The visitor can walk up to the tube and standing, look upwards through it. Through the relatively small round opening at the bottom, can be seen a round video image of a cloudy sky which is projected into the tube from above. The view of the sky seems in this way to be limited to a small round cut-out. The clouds glide by slowly at first, but gradually things begin to change. The air speeds up, slows down or suddenly drifts in a different direction as if the tube itself is moving and starts desperately searching the skies. Pan, tilt, roll … typical camera movements rapidly follow each other. The lapse of time also seems to jump diachronically, sometimes darkness falls, then the sun shines again. This chaotic, sometimes dizzying course is amplified by a sound track in which blissful bird song alternates with howling winds. Angelic choirs swim in the raging of the wind, broken by a short but hefty clap of thunder in a clear sky. “Drunk on eternity, I forget the futilities of this world.” The tube connects the earthly with the heavenly. Staring through the opening, the tube blocks the view on the physical environment and changes it into a rarefied, timeless spaciousness. Man stares on high and is taken up in the heavenly stream, sees nothing but that. The eternal, the heavenly is as beautiful as it is terrifying. It escapes our control and we are handed over to the sublime experience of its force.”
(Geert-Jan Strengholt, World Wide Video Festival Catalog 1997)
DZ Bank Frankfurt – Germany