- #music
- #exhibition
Campo Santo, impure histoire de fantômes
concert-installation with the Cairn Ensemble
2017.06.08
as part of the ManiFeste-2017 festival of the Ircam
Campo Santo proposes to explore a forgotten place: Pyramiden, previously the jewel city of Soviet culture, a northern mining city located on the 78th parallel lost in the Norwegian archipelago of Spitzberg and that was once, in the golden age of Soviet socialism, the emblem of a human organisation built around work. Today abandoned, it is the synonym of an irrefutable destruction whose cause is first and foremost economic decline and the collapse of a cultural model. Campo Santo is a musical proposal by Jérôme Combier, a stage and video proposal by Pierre Nouvel. At once an installation and a concert, Campo Santo invites us to question the ruins of our societies and the wear of time, by heading for the Great North and crossing this forgotten city in which Jerôme Combier and Pierre Nouvel spent several days collecting images and sounds. Campo Santo is also a ghost story, this stroll talks of the stories of men and women who inhabited this city of Spitzberg, who worked there, lived there and left traces of their existence.
“Everything happens in the space, including memories, death, and time. That’s why it is important to wander with a map in one’s hand. If an epiphany is possible, it is spatial and not temporal. It can only be reached if one goes into specific places, if one devotes a lot of time to observing, if one let’s oneself become inhabited by these places in which no one else goes.”
Gwenaëlle Aubry, Le Page blanc, in Face à Sebald, Inculte editions, Monographie collection, Paris, November 2011
