Oliver Beer at the Lyon Biennale An eclipse and a few revelations
By Charlotte Fauve
In a major contemporary art event, an eclipse can sometimes occur. A creator and his work meet a place and create a dazzling effect. At the Lyon Biennial, this rare phenomenon is the work of an artist-composer, Oliver Beer, 38, whose Resonance Project: The Cave, an eight-voice piece for a prehistoric cave in the Périgord Noir region of France, strikes the eye and the mind to such an extent as to make one forget the constellation of 280 works (including 100 new ones), which the event unfolds in nine venues across the Rhône-Alpes metropolis. The fact remains that this “miracle”, in the words of its mistress of ceremonies, Alexia Fabre, director of the Beaux-Arts de Paris and guest curator of this 17ᵉ edition, alone justifies a trip to the far end of the former Grandes Locos railway wasteland, which the Biennial is investing for the first time in La Mulatière, a commune on the banks of the Saône at the edge of Lyon. Here, Beer brings to fruition research begun over fifteen years ago into the sound specific to each space.
It's a quest for the note that could be criticised for its redundancy - it has led him to set up his microphones in a multitude of places, in the giant air pipes of the Centre Pompidou or, most recently, above Monet's water lilies in Giverny, as part of the Normandie Impressionniste event. But in this “choral” biennial entitled Les voix des fleuves, she gives the A or rather the F - a fourteen-thousand-year-old F. It's an F that the artist was surprised to hear vibrating, like the sea in a shell, between the walls decorated with bison and horses in the Font-de-Gaume cave. As well as opening up new perspectives for archaeologists, the British artist has produced a masterpiece, through the magic of paintings created from the pigments that make these sound waves pulsate, and a moving concert of origins given by eight great performers. Among them? Musician Woodkid and singer Mélissa Laveaux, who sang a lullaby from their childhood, undoubtedly on the very site of one of mankind's first concerts. It was enough to transform an industrial hall into a cavern from the depths of time.
