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BORDER SOUNDSCAPES

“Ce ne sont pas les ressemblances, mais les différences, qui se ressemblent”.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Le Totémisme aujourd’hui, 1962

“Photography and drawing, architecture and sound, diagram and world: all of these differences serve to hold the images suspended on the threshold of uncertainty between true and false. We believe in what we see and at the same time, we do not. Hypnotized by the two-dimensionality of the photographic images, chilled and dominated as they are by repeating formulas, we believe in the unreality of the proportions; we come to trust in the unnatural scale of these slices of world on display. The reality of the visible is that there are no more shadows in these architectural border landscapes, these territories on the edge of the known, familiar and unrecognizable, these Zones erased from maps, prisons of our time, all resembling their own differences.

The grid takes on the form of a score composed of mathematical formulas and the architecture thaws out in time to electronic music. We find ourselves immersed in a digital continuum in which matter is stylized and homogenized by the flow of data. Abstraction, in Musi’s photography, must be understood on the basis of its quantitative dimension, a dimension that is geometric, digital, informatic, and electronic. The idea goes beyond a banal aesthetic formalization of structures. Musi is not looking for qualitative beauty, he is striving for the quantitative sublime, a sublime that oppresses and disappoints any form of knowledge.

In the ‘Border Soundscapes’ series, architectural enfermement, sound codes and visual matrices evoke the feeling of a “mathematical sublime”, a feeling generated in equal measure by the mystical pleasure of the formula repeated in the image and by the inadequacy of our gaze when faced with the possibility of piercing and inhabiting the difference and repetition of the peri-urban galaxies that Musi delivers to the eyes of those listening to his soundscapes.”