AQUA MATER

Notice

The sounds of water have always been a great source of inspiration for me. As far back as 1976, in my musical Da capo at the Avignon Festival, I had a naked couple dance to the rhythms of the sea. Shortly afterwards, in Amorgos, I transcribed various recordings of water and synchronised them with a small chamber orchestra. When Sebastião Salgado asked me to accompany his exhibition, I was enthusiastic. The great admiration I have for his talent, and my long-standing fascination with the proposed theme, made me accept straight away. However, the task was not an easy one.
There is a fine line to walk between two imperatives: to appeal to the emotions of the audience without turning them into listeners, and at the same time to organise the sounds so that their sequence seems natural and in harmony with the photographer’s powerful images. What’s more, visitors move around at their own pace without necessarily listening to everything, but accepting what they hear as a possible expression of what they’re looking at. I have tried to fulfil this task by organising what since 1960 I have called phonographies, and after having practised them on several occasions. Neither music nor documentaries, these sound analogues of photography can seek, like photography, to transcend the simple identification of a subject to reveal symbolic and poetic beyond, and to serve as a support for meditation. It’s a long aquatic epic that I’ve organised with these ‘phonographies’. In a vast desert space, the winds gradually bring storm clouds laden with rain. You can barely make out a worried human presence. The water flows in streams and rivers to the sea. Near the shores, the receding water articulates mysterious percussions in caves. Another storm and other rains make drops and bubbles dance, then all this animation dries up to recreate a space revealed up there by the passage of a plane.