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 have just turned away from the work Safe Space to move to our left to the centre of the second floor with its striking verticality. Above us, this patio opens all the way up to the Foundations’ glass roof. The natural light, filtered by grates, filters gently down to us and bathes an imposing stained-glass window consisting of three panels. Floor-mounted spotlights illuminate them indirectly from behind. 

To better consider this piece, let’s go and sit on the bench facing it. 

The central panel of the work—the widest—is set back from the other two, which are slightly narrower. They are housed in three grey metal frames, which are themselves placed on low pedestals. The whole, in a blue monochrome, dominates us from its height of 3.5 metres. While we think of stained glass historically as an imagery accessible to the illiterate faithful, these are, on the contrary, covered with superimposed texts mixing typographical and handwritten characters. They seem to be engraved in different layers of the glass panels. 

On the stained-glass windows, we can distinguish different layers of texts which are superimposed, so much so that some sentences remain illegible, opaque. What signs can we grasp in order to decipher this superimposition of words?

We can sometimes reconstruct fragments of sentences from one panel to another. We also observe parts of text in Greek. The handwriting appears to us as note-taking, an annotation within the paragraph, which is also engraved in the glass.

We can sense the collaborative and evolving nature of this writing, which runs through all the pieces in this exhibition. Moreover, we note that in the works of Wu Tsang and Moved by the Motion, the text is a material in its own right, as much a narrative and theoretical basis as a graphic object. The title Sustained Glass whispers a piece of technical information on these glass panels just standing in their frames. 

Within this textual cacophony, one message emerges clearly: “there is no non-violent way to look at somebody”.

Is there really no way to look at others without producing violence? 

We turn away from Sustained Glass, to move towards the final piece on this floor. It is a video, about thirty minutes long, composed as a collage of fragments of interviews, archives, documentary images, but also excerpts from videos by Wu Tsang. 

Here we see writer and essayist James Baldwin in an interview shot in black-and-white in the 1960s. In it, he discusses his awareness of the critical and ambiguous position of the black minority in the United States in the violent face-off between them and the white majority, which he defines as vast, inattentive, indifferent, cruel.

This passage is followed by a scene on the set of The show is over,. In this scene, one of the characters from the film reappears, and we are struck by his sustained, close-up gaze into the camera.

Other sequences from the film and its soundtrack are interspersed throughout this second video. Are these cut scenes or excerpts from a work in progress?

Then Wu Tsang’s close friends, the writers and musicologists Edward George and Dhanveer Brar, appear on screen. They talk about postcolonial “black pop” music and its ability to bring a community together. They discuss it as a weapon of conquest, of transcendence through the beauty of an identity partly forged by the oppressor.

Later we find James Baldwin in dialogue with passages from a film with the Hollywood icon Bette Davis, who marked Tsang's childhood with her hypnotic eyes. This archival footage of the actress is replaced in the following scene by a contemporary Bette Davis played by actress Lena Schwartz. She is wearing a silver dress, holding a champagne glass and a cigarette. She seems to be rehearsing a role by devouring the camera with her eyes. She repeats, like a refrain, the same sentence: “The more we read all that beauty, the more unreadable we are”, which also turns out to be the title of the video. 

Amidst these images, almost disconnected from the speech, we regularly perceive flights of starlings or a whale diving, like so many underlying poetic evocations. 

Have we been given behind-the-scenes access, access to a form of note-taking? We can see a clear difference in quality from one sequence to another, between contemporary images, archives, and what seems to be found footage. 

Although we have the impression of accessing a working method shared by Wu Tsang and Moved by the Motion, this shifting ensemble is the result of an assertive selection and editing process. Although this video provided us with some leads, we still leave this floor with new questions.