Encountering the monumental work of artist Hera Büyüktaşcıyan at the CCCOD in Tours was a revelation for me.

I had the honor of composing music for her work and performing it in situ.

THE GARDEN

Hera Büyüktaşcıyan explores the different ways in which memory, identity, and knowledge are shaped by waves of history that are both deeply rooted and constantly evolving. In Tours, she was struck by the changing course of the Loire River, which carries ancestral memories but is marked by the presence of our civilization and by Tours' once-glorious past in silk weaving.

Having been born in the Loire Valley myself, Hera's work "The Garden," exhibited opposite her "Defending Ancient Waters" at the Olivier Debré Contemporary Art Center, naturally resonated with me, reminding me of the French gardens typical of our Renaissance heritage. I had the opportunity to accompany flutist Géraldine Carrillo on historical musical repertoire.

Faced with the monumental wave filling the nave, I immediately felt carried away by the Loire current, carrying centuries-old stories. It was natural for Géraldine (Renaissance flutes) and me (percussion, guitar, and electronics) to physically navigate from one bank to the other of these two works, on either side of "Defending Ancient Waters."

The Loire white mulberry trees, silk

Hera's "musical score," made up of wood chips and fragments of memories, guided my work.

Like a musical echo to Defending Ancient Waters, I reinterpreted the words of Kathleen Raine, Virginia Woolf, Charles Péguy, Shakespeare, and Ovid, spoken by actor Bernard Picot, the concert-reading's master of ceremonies, using an electric bowed guitar and electronics.

Downstream

The decision to play the electric guitar with a bow was an obvious one: this bowed string, seemingly unchanging yet subtly shifting, sculpts the sonic shores of my memory over time. "Au fil de l'eau" (with the flow of water) is an expression that, in my opinion, perfectly suits this facet of Hera Büyüktaşcıyan's work, as it brings together the thread (of silk) and the flow of the river. It is therefore the title I have chosen for this musical movement.

Using a looper, I superimposed my musical interpretation of the sequences that Hera created on the surface of the water with the wood chips. Each one disappears from memory but reappears in echoes, transformed by human gesture and time. The current of the Loire River is musically transformed into a soundtrack, a silk thread whose fragments of sound gradually turn into silkworms. It is the electronic processing that transforms them in this way, allowing us to hear the silkworms feeding on white mulberry leaves, then gradually fading away, giving way to the Loire of the present, whose banks have been disrupted by time.