Bastien David

Chlorophyll Synthesis

Here, all existing nature was swallowed up by the predatory energy of expanding urban worlds. Such was the expression to thrill - to shake, rattle, flicker, shake, ripple, crumple... - to embrace Urban Song, premiered in February 2020 at the Festival Présences. Two years after the world came to a standstill, the tumult of the city and the derailment of our system have given way to Chlorophyll synthesis and its creative Nature. It's a distancing, a retreat, a letting-go to the telluric depths, a silent plunge into the moment: microscopic, immensely vegetal. So perhaps the ideal of the piece lies somewhere at the crossroads of living beings, where they meet. The symbolism and syntropy of a children's choir, each a soloist but never solitary, the new and primitive technology of the metallophone and its six times ten fingers, the communicative organicity of the instrumental ensemble: these three entities are like three organs, themselves composed of so many bodies in dependence, in function, in life. The sound discovers a space where "plant time" is run and run and run by the utopian, patient procession of insects. Insects can't go around in their own existence, but their broad, immanent consciousness watches over their endless procession. Chlorophyll synthesis, the second movement of an as yet unfinished journey, embodies a radical and voluntary paradigm shift; a different way of existing, boldly poetic and infinitely sensitive, where human and non-human complicity would become the foundation of an imaginary world we could compose with and for future generations. Far away, in the half-light of a forgotten undergrowth, the flora entrusts us with its omen of thought. Léonard Pauly