Diapason en ligne
Clairières et reconstruction au festival Automne à Varsovie
By Pierre Rigaudière - 1st Oct. 2025
Bearing witness to the event’s pluralistic programming, a radical shift leads to the creation of Pierre Jodlowski’s Insulæ the following day. Arid, even hermetic, Frank Witzel’s text—drawn from The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares—abounds in philosophical references. The islands evoked here are mental ones, at once refuges and prisons, surrounded by an ocean conceived as a thinking organism. While an extremely pared-down stage design (Louise Sari) focuses on the sporadic movements of the six musicians of the Ensemble Phace, the video alternates between static shots of the coastline and interior views of an uninhabited castle. Jodlowski delivers a work that stands apart, through its radicalism and inwardness, from everything he had produced up to that point. Fragments of the text appear either bare or carried by a music of breath, dust-like dispersion, and subtle saturation, punctuated by sequences of impacts and ruptures. The shocks, deep electronic sounds, and spatial-opening effects characteristic of Jodlowski are present, but rarefied and muted—such as that waltz by Johann Strauss II that surfaces briefly before fading away.
Ruch muzyczny
Intensywna obecność (w) dźwięku
By Weronika Bielecka - 20th Oct. 2025
Pierre Jodlowski's Insulæ explored the eternal recurrence of monstrous images and the blurring of the line between reality and its representation. The exceptionally poetic and multi-layered, yet narratively coherent story, combining sound, light, and video with text by Frank Witzel, translated by Zbigniew Naliwajek, transported the audience to another dimension of time and space. Insulæ is, in a sense, a contemporary total work, revealing the perfection of order emerging from chaos through the synthesis of fragmented sounds, words, and images.
