An Instrument Known as Photography — Blind Journal

One {photograph} can conceal one other. That is the entire precept behind Dysnomia Live, a efficiency born ten years in the past from a slideshow exchanged between a photographer and a double bassist, tentative, nearly unintentional. In 2022, a system impressed by VJing, the apply of manipulating video pictures dwell, borrowed from golf equipment and concert events, turned the picture into an instrument in its personal proper. It is a manufacturing of Collectif Déluge. A person stands in the dead of night, a triggering interface beneath his fingers. Images seem, overlap, dissolve to the rhythm of the double bass. Since then, the efficiency, 70 minutes lengthy, has been staged round twenty instances, at Fotografiska in Shanghai, the Blue Note in Beijing, and FRAC Méca in Bordeaux, taking over, relying on the stage, the type of dance, calligraphy, typically one other language. “On stage, photography leaves behind its stillness to become living matter, which I manipulate in real time like an instrument in dialogue with the musicians,” says Alexandre Dupeyron.

The efficiency unfolds round three ontological questions: the place can we come from, what are we, the place are we going? “Silent Green” shifts that arc sideways, forsaking our hubris to take a look at the world from throughout the dwelling somewhat than above it. This shift attracts on two photographic our bodies of labor. Ashes of the Future traces the paths of fireside in Australia, France and the United States, the place Dupeyron labored with researchers from the Rocky Mountain Research Station and the US Department of Agriculture’s Fire Lab, who research hearth somewhat than extinguish it. Pinus Pinaster (2023) turns to pioneer vegetation and their capability to recolonize broken soil, to separate by means of asphalt. “From dehumanized megacities to the resurgence of the wild, the performance unfolds a visual and sonic cosmogony,” Dupeyron sums up. Humanity turns into pharmakon right here, each poison and remedy.

Thomas Julienne reorchestrated the whole rating for this new chapter. A string trio, two violins and a cello, joins the unique lineup. Four new compositions have been written particularly for the event, hovering between avant-garde jazz, post-rock and modern music. The composer additionally leads the quintet Theorem of Joy, whose album Feux was named greatest jazz album of 2025 by the journal Paris Move, which praised “a radical album, not through provocation, but through grace.”

On the visible aspect, fifteen years of analysis and archival sedimentation feed the stagecraft. Alexandre Dupeyron assembles and manipulates his black-and-white pictures dwell, constructing an underground visible arc that traces our presence on the planet, from its origins to the fractures of latest megacities. Photography acts right here as an autonomous narrative engine, on equal footing with the music.

For the world premiere, on Sunday at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), the ensemble welcomes drummer Ches Smith, a longtime collaborator of John Zorn and Marc Ribot. Rounding out the lineup are Ellinoa on vocals, Dylan Ebrahimian on violin, Julie Kim on cello, Dustin Carlson on guitar and Alix Tucou on trombone and keyboard. Each evening, the sequence of pictures reinvents itself; there isn’t a preset rating of visuals.

The following day at Picto, the format tightens right into a quartet: Dupeyron, Julienne on double bass, Ellinoa and Alix Tucou on bass trombone. Julienne pushes the double bass towards preparations and sonic friction, turning the instrument right into a filter for the world’s uncooked pulse. A session conceived as a extra intimate variation on the identical dialogue.

The press has adopted this journey. In French cultural journal Télérama, Thierry Voisin writes that Thomas Julienne’s compositions inform “a story of the blue planet, from the formation of the earth to the final explosion.” For Fabien Ribery, in L’Intervalle, the efficiency sits “somewhere between the dark romanticism of Gérard de Nerval, the science-fiction experiments of Chris Marker and the metaphysical noir of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville.”

In 2023, Dysnomia Live additionally acquired the “L’art de la reprise” prize (SACEM, ONDA, Institut Français), and Alexandre Dupeyron and Thomas Julienne are 2025 Villa Albertine laureates. This New York residency comes with cultural mediation workshops for music and artwork faculties, through which the 2 artists introduce the idea of ecosophy, coined by Norwegian thinker Arne Næss, for whom man will not be on the high of the hierarchy of life however somewhat a part of the ecosphere. A residency undertaking can be underneath dialogue with the Brooklyn Music School and the International Center of Photography, pairing 5 photographer-musician duos round an authentic piece. The tour continues in October on the Musée de la mer in Bordeaux.

The guide Dysnomia, which gathers this identical archival work, serves because the matrix for the efficiency: every visible chapter finds its reply in a composition by Theorem of Joy. “Through his work, Alexandre Dupeyron has built, across his series, uninterrupted conversations from which emerges the sense of a universal matter, like a black hole,” writes exhibition curator François Cheval within the guide’s afterword. “A luminous energy bursts forth, like a vital source, asserting the presence of being as essence.”

World premiere Dysnomia Live · Silent Green, Sunday, September 13, 2026, 4 PM, Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn.

Acoustic session, Monday, September 14, 2026, 7:30 PM, Picto NY, 77 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn (restricted capability, RSVP required).