Oliver Beer An Immersive Experience at the Lyon Biennale

By Claire Moulène

[...] At Grandes Locos, the slap, or rather the caress, is long overdue. But it comes all at once in the second hall, where Oliver Beer's superproduction unfolds. The British artist and musician, who has long been working on the question of acoustic resonance (already tried and tested in the sewers of Brighton and the tubular escalators of the Centre Pompidou), now has his masterpiece. Shot in the Font-de-Gaume grotto in the Dordogne - a miracle of resilience, preserved for 14,000 years and visited sparingly today, with a maximum of 80 visitors per day, in order to respect its equilibrium - the film is diffracted onto eight giant screens. It features a host of star musicians, each in his or her own cavern (depression, chaos or drawer, to borrow a few of the more poetic endings), from Rufus Wainwright to Woodkid to Mélissa Laveaux. They warm up, bringing back memories of nursery rhymes they heard as children. "Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais je t'oublierai,” goes the song. Little by little, the grotto falls into step, and rhymes from Haiti, Scandinavia and France echo and commune, culminating in a stunning finale. Here, the Anthropocene has not begun its mad rush. Here, harmony still exists. You come out all washed, all forgotten. But we have to get back to the surface.