L’Aitre Blanche

Acousmatic & light installation
10 PVC tubes, 10 HP, 10 fluorescent tubes

Aître Blanche is done in October 2008 at the Aître Saint Maclou* (Rouen, France). Nowadays, art school of the town, the Aître Saint Maclou has been a mass grave for the plague that happened in the 12th and 16th centuries. And boneyards are still laying under its floor.

Aître Blanche is a night installation consisting of 10 black PVC sculptures (tubes) 15cmx500cm high, each equipped with a loudspeaker and a fluorescent tube.
This work is about family secrets (structures), unspoken things, lies transmitted consciously or not through generations.

The 10 tubes represent polymorphic entities, male/female and trans-generational aspects of a family.
This topic came to me by chance. The idea at the beginning was to collect confidences (from my family and friends, but also from public areas, movies…).

Words, sentences, strong, simple but fundamental.
Those words, after a selection, got randomly displayed in a row or superimposed ; and that created (after what I would call a work of generational sieving) male/female groups on several generations. From those manipulations and layouts appeared, among others, a topic about child abuse.
The “acousmatic” composition, organisation as well as acoustic scenography became then related to this central topic.

* L’Aître (from the latin word “atrium”) Saint Maclou, former medieval cemetery

the video one follows is small documentary !