Tinguely Cinéphonie

This creation is an attempt at a musical response to the work of Jean Tinguely, a visual artist whom I particularly like and whom I discovered shortly after the inauguration of the museum dedicated to him in Basel. I have always felt that Tinguely’s mobile “sculptures”, a sort of complex and jerky gearing machine, are a wonderful incentive to imagine structures and forms of counterpoint. I am not interested in the sounds of the machines, but in the structures and their interaction with a rich temporal perception.

Tinguely creates a tragi-comic universe: the absurd and the organized, the derisory and the calculated rub up against each other, grating, echoing the macabre dances and catastrophes of the 20th century, to which science has sometimes lent a hand. There is a Tinguely cosmology, a play with closed systems and the perpetual movement of the living/morbid. This vision of an organism-cosmos that is both obstinate and precarious, mechanical and organic, seems to me to have deep resonances today.

Jean-Christophe Marti