The Great Animal Orchestra: Open up & Listen

For our first time around Paris together, my mother, my eldest daughter and I, we decided to choose something fun and enriching, something new to the three of us that would take us into unknown territories, together.

We chose to spend a full afternoon - luxury! - at the Fondation Cartier Pour l’Art Contemporain. I had never been there before, had only heard a lot about it and my mother was thrilled to take us there and be our wise guide. 

The ongoing exhibition is The Great Animal Orchestra. Animals being one of our favorite topics for games, books, conversations and so on, it seemed like the perfect choice, capable of captivating even the youngest of us. It was a bit challenging for my mother to pick this type of exhibition knowing how she is not the animal type of person; the bottom line was to please my daughter, obviously, but also to find common ground for further discoveries, culturally and personally speaking. It was also quite interesting to see how the guide role switched from my mother to my daughter, the animal "specialist". 

Here we are, on the ground floor staged like an orchestra and hosting visual exhibitions of animals in their habitat. From the huge elliptical drawing  “White Tone” made with gunpowder (how ironic) by artist Cai Guo-Qiang to the photos of animals snapping their own pictures flying or walking in front of the flash of Manabu Miyazaki’s camera, every image comes as a refreshingly wild surprise. What would our faces look like on pictures taken just as suddenly as we discover the work of all these artists, I cannot help but wonder…

The colors, the sounds and the images - whether animated or not - pull us into a fearsome yet familiar kingdom where flora and fauna unite and let us in, exceptionally. Fear, surprise and laughter show on our faces. “Is the bear really going to eat the photographer’s camera? Look at that bird’s flight!” Each and every visual input triggers a reaction in each of us. Sometimes similar, sometimes utterly different. That’s what I call richness.

As we plunge downstairs, the mysteries of plancton and the muted sounds from underwater life hug us as if we were going back to the primal womb. Dark rooms are fitted with luminous screens on the floor where shapes of  plancton life move in an infinitesimal world. Alien seems to be all around us, in the air and in deep waters. So why do we actually fear the alien?

Hopping half-hypnotised already from one room to the other, we reach the sound room. Plunged into darkness again, our hearing and eyesight are sharp and fully alive. On the walls, the sounds turn into wave length graphics, accompanying the screams of animals typical of a meadow, a delta, a valley… Wolves, geese, whales, jaguars and their brothers pull at our lethargic urban mind and dig their way into our imagination. As if by magic they turn into flesh. The captivating audio landscapes are the result of the year-long recordings of musician and bio-acoustician Bernie Krause. Music in its various shapes, from nature to electro, is his passion. 

People linger in the room, in awe. Sitting on the cushions or lying on the floor, they abandon themselves to nature and its simplest form - while being underground, in the heart of one of the world’s metropolises. That’s when my daughter kicks her shoes off. She walks around barefoot before lying down too. 

Back to the basics. Back to nature.

From the magic of the US territories, to Africa and Europe, the trip is one long experience of a life we often dream about, only never truly listen too. The exhibition is a great way to learn to listen again by shutting down all that man-made noise; a way to listen a anew - to yourself, your neighbour, your mother, your friends, your pulsing heart… Open up and listen.

Credits: Unsplash (edited by TheDaydreamer)