Fondation Cartier...Le Grand Orchestre des Animaux

A re-visit to a gallery space we love...Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, a not-for-profit gallery for exhibitions, conferences and performances.  The gallery is a magnificent structure of glass and steel - designed by Jean Nouvel, who also designed the visually amazing Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris - and is surrounded by a seemingly wild, meadow-like garden, itself a work in progress.  There is a soaring glass wall between the garden and the street, and it literally feels as if you've walked into a silent bubble in central Paris.

The current exhibition is titled Le Grand Orchestre des Animaux.  The inspiration for the exhibition is work by American musician and bioacoustician, Bernie Krause, who has spent much of his life recording the ecosystem in which we live.  Among the contributors to the exhibition are artists from China, the Congo, Japan, photographers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in the US, and visual artists and photographers from the oceans research schooner 'Tara Expeditions'.  Oh my goodness, I love this exhibition!

On the ground floor there is a panoramic image created in gunpowder of animals, both prey and predators, gathered around a pool.  You can sit and watch sound and image videos of birds dancing their incredible courtship displays.  There is a wall of white tiles, featuring hand-painted birds by a Brazilian artist.  Below ground, there are two darkened rooms:  one, a video installation in pool-like rectangles on the floor - Plankton, A Drifting World at the Origin of Life - created by Japanese artist Shiro Takatani in collaboration with composer Ryuichi Sakamoto; the other, a scrolling sonogram of recordings made by Bernie Krause in locations such as the Amazon rainforest, oceans and national parks.

I learned that the sound each creature makes fits into a specific bandwidth within the ecosystem soundscape, so they can always be heard - whether they be foraging for food, courting, or in fear.  It was incredibly moving to listen to the difference between original and later recordings of areas impacted by human intervention - logging for example - the sounds reduced to almost silence.

In the garden there is La Cabane du Chat, in which you can watch a short video installation by French visual artist and film director Agnès Varda.  The video focuses on the resting place of Zgougou, her well-loved family cat, buried in the family garden on the tiny French island of Noirmoutier.  I think she sums up exactly how I felt when she says, "From the grave in the direction of the pinetrees, one can see the ocean and the place on the island where Zgougou was laid to rest, a tiny little dot on the planet, a tiny little cat."