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 taken the main stairs on the second floor. It becomes apparent that these intermediate spaces, lit by orange neon lights, are part of an overall scenography. Here we are at the uppermost level of the Foundation, which is relatively narrow. The rhythms that we perceived when we enter the second room become more present: we sense that we are approaching another audiovisual work. To our right is a balcony. 

The second floor provides us with a new point of view. This view over the Sustained Glass stained-glass windows allows us to consider them from a wider angle. 

The question of the gaze and its stakes is played out here in a performative way. While the words of Sustained Glass remain frozen in glass, we, on the other hand, have moved. By extension, we have the intuition that this exhibition is an ode to movement, to the abandonment of fixed, coercive points around which words and identities are constructed. 

Let us be guided towards the heady rhythm which is coming from a dark room beyond the balcony. We have the sensation of having entered a black box, also a place of passage, where we are invited to stop on a bench in front of a video running for just over three minutes, entitled Sudden Rise. As images accumulate in synchrony with the soundtrack’s struck notes, like a litany, we wonder about the projection device. The video is shown on a thick black stage curtain. The spoken passages, in English, are subtitled in French on a small screen fixed at the top of this curtain, like plays and operas in foreign languages. The moving images are thus mixed with the tools of the performing arts, fixed in this narrow room. 

Academic drawings, scientific illustrations, archival images, photographs: this sequence of views appears like an archaeology of the Western gaze. They are intermingled with figures hidden or set aside by a consensual history of art. In passing, we come across the figure of Harriet Tubman, an anti-slavery activist, who was, moreover, supposed to appear on the 20-dollar bill before the decision was suspended by former US president Donald Trump. 

This sequence gives way to a wide shot, in which Wu Tsang’s voice replaces the notes repeated previously. 

We discover a green space by twilight that seems banal at first glance. The quality of the image and sound is strikingly raw. 

The camera begins a circular sweep as bodies appear in the frame and fall backwards, as if being shot by our gaze.

“Maybe the problem is to look, which is the same as saying, to listen”. 

If the exhibition seemed to open with its end with The show is over, we would now expect to see the curtain open for the play to begin. Yet it remains closed. We think back to the conversation between Dhanveer Brar and Edward George, the whales and the echoes of The show is over, which circulate between the floors. Perhaps we can see in them avenues for a relationship to the world transcended by sound, for a regime of the gaze freed from a single point of view—by the eyes, by the camera, by language.

We now head for the exit and take the service stairs down three floors to the Foundation’s open-air courtyard.