Black. Sounds of setting up.
A few instructions in German.
Silence. Breath.
Clap.
Suddenly, music gushes and a luminous constellation comes into being. Like music notes moving along a stave, bright dots seam to flit onto the sound of music. A new space is created; silences answer each other. One thinks of synethesia, the mixing of the arts, the possibility for an image to resonate together with the music in an almost choreographic appearance, where «colors and sounds respond to one another» as do the correspondances between the arts that Charles Baudelaire associated with the very art of creation.
Very soon, one realises it is much more than that, that the bright dots are related to the musicians who generate sound and image in one go, at the whim of their movements. The sound does not accompagny the image and does not illustrate the music but makes it visible as it is being interpreted. Everything is already inherent to the scene.
Shot with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester during a residency, “Constellations” prolongs the experimentation that the artist had started in 2005 with a video called “L’orchestre”, in which only the hands of the musicians were visible to the spectators.
Here, Bernhard Lang’s composition «Felder - Im Vorübergehen» (1993/2008), sublimated by Zahra Poonawala, establishes a breath-taking dramaturgy imbued with poetry. The audio and visual interactions and the variations of intensity that derive from them generate a spatial structure and a singular temporality in which the sound seems to embody itself, becoming thus almost tangible; till the point where everything freezes again, leaving silence to space.
Anne-Sophie Miclo, August 2016
[1]Charles Baudelaire « Correspondances » (1861) dans Œuvres complètes, éditions Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade », Paris, 1975, p.11.
Direction: Zahra Poonawala / Composition: Bernhard Lang
Tracking technique: Michi Meier
Editing: Zahra Poonawala
Composition: Bernhard Lang
Recording: Claudia Heupel
Conductor: Christof M Löser
Orchester Stuttgarter Kammer Orchester
Acknowledgments Verlag ZEITVERTRIEB WIEN BERLIN
