Emmanuel Lagarrigue
1972, Strasbourg (France)
Lives and works in Paris (France)
I never dream otherwise than awake, 2006
Sound installation
21 blue fluorescent lights strips, 8 columns of crystal cables, 110 speakers,
various audio equipment, 12 digital audio files AIFF, French version
6min 20sec
Gift from Amis du Centre Pompidou for the Contemporary art project, 2008
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle (Mnam / Cci)
AM 2008-24
Emmanuel Lagarrigue is a visual artist, sculptor, composer and director who explores different forms of language and transforms them through the prism of memory and experience.
I never dream otherwise that awake (2006) is an immersive multimedia installation that explores the traces of language and collective memory linked to our inner lives. Songs that are hummed and deconstructed, underpinned by electro-acoustic vibrations, reveal a soundscape bathed in a blue hue evocative of dreams and self-abandonment.
The blue colour, emitted by neon lights, forms horizontal broken lines that guide the spectator's path through eight columns of crystal-coated audiovisual cables. Small loudspeakers hang from these cables, their membranes exposed like the eight voices we hear, fragmented by meticulous cutting and collage. These male and female voices, each performing an original musical composition, blend together, inviting the audience to listen, to become one with and to interact with each other. Added to this acoustic phenomenon is a second, spatialised musical composition from loudspeakers placed around the perimeter of the auditorium, amplifying the meaning of this sonic experience.
This sensory space also suggests another language, that of the poetic word, which recalls the words of Maurice Blanchot: "In the poem, language is never real at any of the moments through which it passes, for in the poem language is affirmed in its totality. Yet in this totality, where it constitutes its own essence and where it is essential, it is also supremely unreal."