Paris (AFP)

From top to bottom, the Pompidou Center pays homage to Christian Boltanski this weekend: an opera in the underground car park reenacts the haunting theme of the great French artist to which the museum devotes a retrospective: the fight against oblivion.

Bells vibrate on the finger of cellists, projectors launch halos of light, curtains printed with blurred faces in black and white recall the disappeared who have always haunted the artist of Jewish father and Catholic mother, born in 1944.

The immersive opera entitled "FOSSE", which is performed on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, is a commission from the Opéra Comique, in coproduction with the Center Pompidou.

It was designed by Christian Boltanski with the musician, composer and pianist Franck Krawczyk, and with Jean Kalman responsible for designing the lighting.

In the Dantesque lair, in the middle of a fog of smoke, resounds the voice of the soprano Karen Vourc'h, accompanied by 32 singers from the Accentus ensemble, thirteen cellos, six pianos, electric guitars.

Two percussionists without mallets tap various materials with their hands to make the place vibrate with unusual and rhythmic sounds that participate in the opera.

There is even the rumor of cars passing in the Berger tunnel nearby.

"Beautiful sound is no longer the subject here, the beautiful Platonic is not possible. The orchestra is no longer protected in its pit but the musicians are dispersed among the spectators. There is no We are in an uncomfortable position with music that remains demanding, "explains Franck Krawczyk.

Spectators can discover different echoes depending on where they are in the parking lot. "We cannot exhaust all listening angles in three hours. This performance makes the space better. Afterwards we will hear something else", assures the composer, who underlines the increasing dimension of sound in the recent work of Boltanski.

Characters wearing disturbing masks are trapped in tarpaulin-covered cars with interior lights, all headlights on.

Messages accompanied by an oppressive heartbeat, an enigmatic signature that can be found in the retrospective on the 5th floor of the national museum of modern art.

- Enclosure and snowy landscape -

The exhibition "Make your time", until March 16, deciphers the provocative message of the artist who confides, in an interview with the daily Le Monde, that his "main activity is to fight against oblivion, disappearance" .

The exhibition opens with a deliberate visual shock that creates discomfort: a video of a seated man who keeps vomiting is looped. Video that says the confinement, the confinement he knew as a child with his traumatized post-war family where the story of the Shoah was omnipresent.

A snowy landscape passes by, as from the window of a train. Boltanski also carefully collects the small objects from his childhood, and puts pictures of him side by side at different ages.

By the hundreds, it displays black and white faces, whether or not accompanied by small lamps, which speak of the disappeared or of people who are very old and at the end of their life: like an album, photos of a happy family, the D family .

Then children from the Mickey club taken in 1955. And, further on, the faces of victims of the Holocaust, and of some of their executioners, side by side.

Boltanski are also stacks of metal boxes with name tags, veils shaken by fans from which stand out faces, looks of children, men, women like ghosts. But, in the last works, the free wind agitates the bells, signs of liberation.

Recalling The Walking Man by Giacometti, black suits hanging on easels come alive as the spectator passes by, and ask him: "Have you suffered?" "Did you vomit?" ...

"I was a kind of ethnologist of myself. I sought to find my past and reinvented it at the same time, with images of the others," he confided in his interview to Le Monde.

© 2020 AFP