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01/10/2022 - Düsseldorf (Germany), Tonhalle - Ensemble Notabu, Mark-Andreas Schlingensiepen (conductor)
Nowhere cities is a project specifically conceived for the ensemble Notabu and commissioned by it. Nowhere cities is a 20-minute piece conceived in 5 movements for 15 instruments and electronic. It proposes the portrait of 5 imaginary cities. These fictitious, chimerical cities, inspired by European cities, bear reconstructed names: Costerdon, Palin, Selis, Londam, Niven, Berhague, Amperis. Sound surveys will be recorded in seven European capitals chosen for their linguistic differences: Paris, London, Venice, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Berlin. Electroacoustic sounds are inserted within the instrumental music, sometimes in the form of fragments scattered throughout the orchestra, sometimes in the form of autonomous interludes.
Each of these Nowhere cities is a sound and formal, architectural project. Far from being inspired by photography (Düsseldorf School, Andreas Gursky, Michael Wolf, Cyrus Cornut, Laurent Kronental) and architectural projects (Le Corbusier's Neighbouring Plan, the SeaTree project of the Waterstudio Agency, Vincent Caillebaud's architectural speculations on a futuristic Paris), each city, each movement, proposes its own material, its own architecture, each city is a sound journey that is a particular space in itself.
Here it is the monstrosity of the cities that challenges us and the feeling that they are our habitats and our prisons. It is an environmental questioning which pre-exists the project and somewhere an ecological questioning, even if, in this case, we are in the trap: each city is a seductive or horrific trap and there is no solution.
It is astonishing to note that when we apprehend our cities with a certain distance - the distance of a camera placed at a distant point, a drone, etc. - when we consider them from a global point of view, they appear fascinating, beautiful or ugly no matter, but captivating because of their organization, and the geometries they draw, when we look at them from this global point of view, appear to be more or less the same. - But conversely, when we get physically lost in them, when we venture into their corners, our cities reveal a completely different reality : both banal and harsh, sad and repulsive. It is the eternal debate between the whole and the detail, between the idea and the empiricism, between the things of art (kunstdinge, as Rilke wrote) and the triviality of the things that surround us. Where do we stand?
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