Composition
Onceim & Jacques Perconte
LIVE VIDEO CREATION
Jacques Perconte
FIRST CREATION
27.10.2022
PLACE OF CREATION
Le Consulat, Paris
LENGTH
50 minutes env.
STAFF
18 to 33 musicians
TitLE
TANT QUE LA MONTAGNE
Audiovisual performance
Description
Since 2019, Onceim has gone further in its practice of collective creation and comprovisation by bringing its sounds together with images produced and remodelled in real time by videographer Jacques Perconte.
A major figure on the artistic and digital scene and in the French cinematographic avant-garde since the end of the 1990s, Jacques Perconte has developed an audiovisual and cinematographic oeuvre in which environment and landscape are the vehicles of an aesthetic that upsets both vision and the technologies used.
In this new audiovisual adventure built around partly unpublished images, they bring their individual know-how together in a common artistic goal of telling the story of the Alps, blurring our usual scale relationships in space and time. A multidisciplinary, immersive, poetic production in which the audience’s gaze is directed towards the mountains, observing grandeur and disappearance, permanence and collapse.
“While I love mountains for the immensity of their romantic echo, the mountains are perhaps unfortunately also the place where I am most aware of the reflection of the collapse of our society. Our civilization as it is will not survive the massacre it is bringing about on the living, the instability it is imposing on systems. The mountains are collapsing, the absurdity of mass tourism intensifying the fragility of these environments. In losing their permafrost, the high peaks threaten to collapse. Melting glaciers feed the unleashing of torrents that cut into valleys. As long as mountainous landscapes remain as they are, we can still visit them, but once the line maintaining their stability has been crossed, this will become so dangerous that we will no longer be able to go there to dream. This audiovisual adventure tells this story of the collapse of cliffs, of the vertiginous fall of humanity in its technical vision of the world.
The limpid beauty of the mountains will no longer be accessible and we will only have images to remember them by. Structured vertically, the image brings the catastrophe to life. It slides poetically from green pastures to falling rocks. The forces present are indescribable and nothing can resist them. Every moment reminds us that these immense rocky masses, balanced on the peaks, are constantly eroding. Driven by telluric forces, they are blown by the winds which sculpt their profile over millennia. This piece is a surge, a storm of stones. The waves here are so big and solid that you can only see them moving when they break. As it is with the mountains, the wind, so it is with humanity, but one thing is for sure, unless we change, we cannot say that there is still time.”
Jacques Perconte