Hello and welcome to Innervision, Lafayette Anticipations’ audio tour podcast designed by the facilitation team. Let us take you on a sound journey to the heart of contemporary creation. Season 1: Wu Tsang’s visionary company exhibition. 

We are on the first floor of the Foundation in the small space opening onto a curved corridor. We can already see that the room is plunged into darkness. Amidst the muffled atmosphere of the room with its grey walls and grey carpet, we can hear the song of a blackbird in the distance.

As we walk along the curved wall, the singing gets louder. At the end of this corridor we can see, illuminated from the right, a sculpture on a relatively high plinth. Its contours form an equilateral triangle, a perfect triangle. As we pass by, we discover a string of large pillars behind which a large panoramic video is being screened, also projected onto a curved surface. 

Ideally, we would stay for around thirty minutes to see the entirety of this work with its contrasting sequences. 

It is with these few words from Fred Moten’s eponymous poem, which structures the whole work, that the film The show is over, opens. We are now facing the projection, in this space of sounds and images surrounded by the sound of an anonymous, noisy, moving crowd. The sound circulates from one side to the other, a community of sound presses and pushes us. Bodies pass close by, brush against us, and come together in the middle of the theatre stage that serves as the main set for the film. A recited and danced struggle begins, the stakes of which we do not all understand: oppressors and oppressed merge, some dancers are seized, dragged by others, seemingly in consent. The sound gets louder, cellos form a crescendo, the image breaks up into rhythms and syncopations. The sequences are organized around the peak of intensity that has just passed. Political and poetic language intertwine to take us through a whole emotional landscape that is alternately dark, violent, and vaguely disturbing. 

Some passages stand out: in one of them a woman squatting down tries to hold a pile of apples in her arms, which keep slipping away from her. In another, she is standing alone again, in the middle of a wide, muddy expanse, plunged into darkness, threatened by sounds. Further on, the atmosphere calms down, the sound of a saxophone rises from a staircase against a blue background that leads nowhere. We then remember this sculpture seen in the distance as we entered the space, and when we turn around, we see that it is a replica of the stairs in the video. By walking around this sculpture, we realize its apparent fragility: it is made of dry earth, a direct reminder of the mud in which bodies were dragged earlier. We also realize that the triangle is only an optical illusion, it is a Penrose staircase which reveals two staircases joined at their base by a horizontal platform. While from a certain angle the vertices seem to meet perfectly, in reality they couldn’t be further away from each other. The title of the work PIE root “to see” seems to be a reference to the origins of linguistics and one wonders: how is language, like perspective, about a lens, a point of view that places words and beings in an arbitrary place? 

Although the title of the video, The show is over,, announces the opposite, the show is just beginning. 

We walk up to the second floor through the service stairs bathed in amber light, guided by the murmur of a voice calling out to us.