En Souvenances

En Souvenances is an immersive work combining visual and sound art.

Alone, you slip into a resonant space—a luminous cave—for a journey through memory and time via the recollections of people at every stage of life, memories and daydreams spoken or sung.

Immersed in the heart of the stories, voices, and breaths of sound creation, visitors are invited to explore their own memory as a unique landscape, journeying, perhaps, beyond mere recollection.

What tempts me here is a plunge into the waters, the mysteries, and the manifestations of Memory. Memory—Mnemosyne—is the mother of the Muses, those who create, celebrate creation, or inspire creators. In their writings, the Greeks mention her rather sparingly. We often forget Memory. Yet she is no less present. By learning this—that is, by “remembering” it—I open the door to a vast meditation. Mother and daughters, they see. They see the moment, what came before, and what comes after. When one drinks from the fountain of Memory, one no longer dies. They offer me a relationship with time that I cannot grasp, but of which I can dream—and thus remember.

I wish to take this journey over a thousand years, or, if not, through a hundred ages. A hundred voices, a hundred stories, a hundred memories. One hundred people who will offer snippets of their landscape, who will remember, who will forget, who will invent. Through their voices, their silences, their breaths, their hesitations. Their sound-matter. Their sound-being. The Greeks tell me that, within the soul, there is a piece of wax into which our memories are imprinted. That it is a gift from Memory. A present.

May I, in turn, make an offering to it, with this space into which you will enter, as if into its all-knowing womb, and in which the dream-memories of a hundred voices—or a thousand—of a hundred faceless faces will awaken within you your own images, your own ages, and your own memories, and will lead you—for we are walking—until you remember what you do not remember.
There certainly was a beginning. Or perhaps not.

Juliette Kempf, concept and text