Souffles terrestres

Visit the Centre de la Vieille Charité from 24 October to 13 December for the exhibition “Souffles terrestres”.

The Chroniques Biennale of Digital Imaginings is joining forces with the Museums of Marseille to present installations by Etienne Rey and Stéphanie Roland at the Centre de la Vieille Charité.

The works brought together in this exhibition make perceptible the discreet forces that pass through matter, landscapes and bodies. Vibrations of water, seismic movements, underground frequencies and mineral resonances create environments in which the Earth appears as a living, unstable and active entity.

In the face of climate upheaval and extractivist practices, the artists shift our gaze: natural elements are no longer mere silent backdrops, but forces capable of reacting, emitting signals and producing their own narratives. The exhibition opens a space for sensitive listening in which the earth’s breaths become forms—subtle or loud—of resistance.

• Stéphanie Roland BE Serpentine night Video installation

Serpentine night is a video installation exploring California’s geological fault system. This mosaic portrays the notion of the fault line between reality and fiction, the real and virtual worlds, geography and affects. Invisible earthly phenomena will be probed here, as well as very human faults—the trembling of societies. By giving a voice to the soil, it becomes possible to move beyond dominant anthropocentric narratives; listening to non-human entities becomes a way of healing our extractivist relationship with territories. To resist is to imagine other ontologies, with a stronger relationship between inhabitants and their territories, and to speculate that they can cross the fault, build and create in the fissure.

• Étienne Rey Impermanence Installation

Impermanence is a visual, sculptural and sound installation composed of five water sculptures in perpetual recombination. The work explores resonance as a fundamental principle, bringing into play cyclical and wave phenomena arising from the interaction between matter, gravity and a mechatronic choreography of movement.. Inspired by a seismic event that occurred in Greenland, it translates vibrational dynamics into a sensitive scale, where forms, sounds and instabilities emerge.

In connection with the notion of resistance, Impermanence affirms an attentiveness to fragile balances and the forces that pass through the world. Faced with ecological upheaval and systems of domination, the work offers a perceptual experience based on coexistence, listening and transformation. Conceived as a continuity between the visible and the audible, it makes resonance a space of experience: the movements of water, sound vibrations and mechanical cycles compose an unstable landscape in which resistance takes the form of heightened attention to the balances of living things.

The artists

• Stéphanie Roland Stéphanie Roland is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Brussels. She makes films and installations that explore, between documentary and imagination, the invisible structures of the Western world, vast timescales and hyperobjects. She draws inspiration from a variety of fields, ranging from ecology and politics to geology and the cosmos.

After graduating from La Cambre and attending Hito Steyerl’s class at UDK Berlin, she completed a course at Le Fresnoy – Studio National. Her work is regularly presented internationally, and her projects have been included in exhibitions at major institutions: the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum, Musée du Louvre, Musée Benaki, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Botanique, Kampala International Art Biennale, Wiels and ISELP. Breda Photo, Belfast Photo Festival, Encontros da Imagem, BIP Liège and MOPLA Los Angeles are among the photography festivals in which she has participated.

Her films have been screened at international festivals such as Visions du Réel, FID Marseille, Festival dei Popoli, ZINEBI Bilbao, FEST New Directors / New Films, the Rencontres Internationales Paris / Berlin, Curtas Cinema and PÖFF Shorts Tallinn Black Nights, among others. Her first film, Podesta Island, won the Alice Guy Prize at FID Marseille, and her second film, Le cercle vide, received the TËNK Prize at the Visions du Réel festival in Nyon.

A “prospective” programme presenting all her films was organized at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2024.

• Etienne Rey Etienne Rey’s work explores the very notion of space. The aim is to produce shifts in perception. Questions of place and environment, of in situ and architecture, contribute to the discovery of spatial structures through shifts and the multiplication of viewpoints.

The various installations have in common that they invite experiences made up of the material and immaterial, energies and attractions that bring physical phenomena into play, with light as their main vector. Reflexive transformations take place between perception, which is specific to each person, and awareness of the impact of our presence. The intention is to produce experiences of space. The works reveal how space is structured. Between immaterial installations made of mist and light and those using materials with optical properties, all the works develop perceptual filters of the environment, leading us to question our relationship with reality.

More information about the exhibition and the Chroniques biennale programme: https://chroniques-biennale.org/event/souffles-terrestres/

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