OUR KIDS – THE COLOR OF PEACE – TEASER – AN INSTALLATION BY MANUELA MORGAINE from L'Œil à Mémoires on Vimeo.

OUR KIDS – THE COLOR OF PEACE – INTEGRAL – AN INSTALLATION BY MANUELA MORGAINE from L'Œil à Mémoires on Vimeo.

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MEMORANDUM OF THE PLAGUE

Based on the book by Georges Didi-Huberman

Fondation Fiminco on November 27, 2021

as part of the exhibition THE CROWN LETTER/PHOTODAYS

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SOUND PILLOWS

White pillows inhabit a room. They are listening chambers,

inviting an intimate posture. Each holds within it a few minutes

of original composition.

The sonic pillows alternate between sleeping and waking states,

letting whispers of low masses and gentle waves be heard.

Tactile and sonic surfaces.

The pairing of the object with the realm of sleep sets

listeners wandering like somnambulists.

The sensuality of touch against the pillowcase,

the music rising from within the pillow seeks to offer an experience

both tactile and supra-sensory of sound,

the experience of another form of chamber music.

LISTEN TO A LOVE PILLOW

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LEAD BODIES

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ORACULAR PERFORMANCES

A foreshadowing of ORAKL – a spokesperson in production.

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TRAIL OF TEARS – the path of tears

Performance presented at Galerie Maubert, September–December 2013

The Trail of Tears, in Cherokee Nunna daul Isunyi

“the trail where they cried”, in English Trail of Tears,

is the path of forced displacement of several Native American nations

by the United States between 1831 and 1838.

Between 4,000 and 8,000 of them perished along the way, from cold,

hunger, or exhaustion, along the Trail of Tears.

The feather adornment bordering the map of the USA

evokes the setting apart, the confinement onto reservations, of the Indians,

and the two phosphorescent trails, glowing in the night, evoke the two paths

of the Trail of Tears by waterway (Mississippi & Tennessee)

and overland, just as they mirror the twin streams of tears

running down either side of a remembering face.

Teaser

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FREEHAND

Performance presented at the Musée Picasso, Paris, on May 22, 2016, with Cyril Hernandez

Freehand is an attempt at reconstruction,

a reshaping of an artwork destroyed by the hand of man.

The performance unfolds in two movements: the projection of an original video,

revealing the sequence of a destruction of ancient statues,

followed by a videographic rewind allowing

the works to be rebuilt—restored—instantaneously.

Then, the live sculpting of a form upon a potter’s wheel,

echoed by the percussive hands of an alchemist musician.

This performance by Manuela Morgaine grapples directly

—and intensely—with the question of the power of creation and destruction

wrought by the hand of Man. Here lies the urgent need

to reinvent Freehand as a continuous artistic form,

in the wake of Picasso’s ceaseless creation,

thus bringing forth a work whose very movement resists,

by taking shape before our eyes, its own destruction.

Teaser

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FROSTED PERFORMANCES

SNOW WHITE SLEEPLESS NIGHT

Sound ice

October 5, 2002 – 8:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m.

Forecourt of the Gaité Lyrique, Paris

The glass coffin preserves intact Snow White and the memory of her fairy tale.

Ice is a wellspring of transparency and preservation.

Snow White Sleepless Night radiates the memory of a performance

or tableau vivant white on white, after the fairy dramolet by Robert Walser,

which came into being at the Centre Culturel Suisse one evening in December 2001.

Of the performance, here, upon the forecourt of the Gaité Lyrique, nothing remains

but visual and sonic matter: the block of ice, on a human scale,

figure of Snow White’s coffin, speaks and holds the soundtrack,

propagating it, while it melts throughout the night.

A sleepless night, a white night—such is its lifespan.

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ICEREMONY

projections of fire ceremonies onto ice

Swedish Cultural Institute, Paris, Nuit Blanche, October 2004

The indigenous peoples of the Americas, Native Americans, hold the secret of the sun and fire.

A surviving species, wounded knee, an escaped kind,

defying extinction. Iceremony preserves their memory in ice.

Ice promises the preservation of faces and their History.

Pierre Lobstein’s videos, captured over fifteen years from

Oklahoma to New Mexico, offer the gaze and voice of the contemporary Indian,

granting it an unprecedented form, gifting it a perspective, a frame, and an aura.

The matter of ice holds intact and crystallizes, diffuses and refracts, sustains and propagates the aura.

Iceremony, Teaser 2003

Iceremony, 2003

ICELECTRIC

Lightning strikes in ice

Swedish Cultural Institute, Paris, December 11, 2006

as part of “Paris Illumine Paris”.

At nightfall, a projection of diverse lightnings inside

a block of ice set like a lightning rod within the paved courtyard of the Hôtel de Marle.

Icelectric, 2005

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OPERA

THE ART OF THE FIG

Opera – Poem

The Art of the Fig was conceived in 1998.

It was premiered as part of the MUSICA festival

in Strasbourg on October 6, 2006. Conceived, from its very inception,

in a musical form of live performance.

Francis Ponge’s The Fig is a poem, looping,

unfurling across its every seam.

It is a poem (thefig) shedding, one by one, each of its skins.

It is the same poem, over a hundred times. Drawn from the book

How a Fig of Words and Why whose principle,

decreed by Ponge himself, is to publish all drafts

and manuscripts of a single poem, without choice or restriction of any kind.

It is the birth of the fig-poem, or how to embody the poem

in the shape of a fig. Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue

as the continuous resonance of the poem-fig.

For this Art, Bach multiplied the paths of orchestration:

keyboards, strings, winds…

This Art is multiplicity, the infinitude of music. It exists to unravel in endless variations.

It is ever the same phrase that, through counterpoint, otherwise elaborates itself.

It is a work that also remains unfinished.

I invited composer Johannes Schöllhorn to rewrite

Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue,

and through a play of anamorphoses, he wove several

of the seven movements upon which my project adorns itself.

The oeuvre of Johannes Schöllhorn has forever brought

musical tradition face to face with the contemporary, through the alchemy of transcriptions.

Fig and Fugue intertwined to speak, to hear, and to behold how

something takes shape, and how every form declines and unfolds.

An orchestra (the fugue) performing the one, a narrator (the fig)

performing the other—the principle of variation or counterpoint.

Performance audio recording