Détour

Gaîté Lyrique - Paris

2021

Visual System creates Détour: a three-dimensional sculpture, evolving and colorful, forming an atmosphere both sonorous and visual inviting to wander and contemplate. With Détour, the space is transformed into an astonishing luminous and sound forest with a hint of an optical illusion.

The visitor, totally free of his movements, discovers sixteen totems of a height of 2,50 meters streaked with LED. Inspired by abstract pictorial sculptures, these luminous monoliths are erected within a space plunged into darkness. They come to life and respond to the rhythm of a sound creation that guides us through the meanders of a new ecosystem, opening a dialogue between man, nature and machine.

Sound and light awaken in tandem. As we cross, the sound perception intensifies. The light is soft and indirect. The music, created by composers Thomas Vaquié & Alexandre Bouvier, is enveloping. Détour invites you to get lost in a morphing of sound and visual landscapes, in a dreamlike forest regenerating new perceptions, sheltering new worlds.

The French collective Visual System transports us to the heart of a forest with geometric abstraction, regenerating new perceptions. From its slender and split trunks, soft electroluminescent sources, colored undulating beams and a great orchestra of sounds obeying together to secret harmonic consonances. Enveloped on all sides under its sound vault crossed by sun and shadows, without landmarks and without fixed point of view, we are everywhere in its center and we melt in the middle of it, where everything is similar. In a poetic of space, the work of kinetic wandering Detour reverses the perspectives and comes to life: it reaches out to us, pulls us to it, cradles us and carries us. Does it remind us of the importance of moving forward to get out of the depths of these places whose contours are not always clear and to let the inevitable unexpected come?

— Jos Auzende, Artistic Director of the Gaîté Lyrique