Iter

The night that was waning and kept waning without bringing daylight will clothe the Rue musicale until 10 October 2027. Its creator, Amalia Laurent, animates it with musical performances that probe how space and matter are altered by sound.

Amalia Laurent's practice is rooted in traditions inherited from Java and Occitanie. She specialises in Western printing techniques stemming from fifteenth-century engraving and from the earliest maps circulated for economic and strategic purposes. The artist also works in parallel with batik, whose motifs likewise constitute specific catalogues of Indonesian territories. In turn, she regards them as geographical representations that one wears.

The work with images, borders and the porousness of real and imagined worlds allows the Franco-Indonesian visual artist to present alternative realities, which sound here serves to alter. Her monumental textile installation is then transformed into an immense vibrational map, or into a wall dividing the space in two. This suspended veil, both projection surface and cosmological plan, organises circulation and the gaze, constrains bodies as they move through the Rue musicale, and suggests a metaphor for a sonic construction by the collective, at the heart of her practice.

The composition for the performance, Iter — a lived path or journey, from the Latin — is original and collective. It brings together six musicians and singers around the gamelan ensemble of the Musée de la musique and instruments made in Indonesia by the artist. Performed at the heart of the Rue musicale, around the suspended textile work, the musical piece unfolds a sonic framework that is built through the synchronisation of the performers and of the space they together reconfigure.

Iter is co-produced by the Cité de la Musique - Philharmonie de Paris and the Académie de France à Rome - Villa Médicis