Ten

2018

The series Ten was made from ten cinematographic adaptations, more or less official and assumed as such, of the novel Ten Little Niggers by Agatha Christie. It proposes flawed structures of these different adaptations which take the form of inventories of sounds from these different films or collections of images working around motifs or themes common to most of them.

Ten soundtracks reproduce the frames of each adaptation. With durations identical to those of the films from which they were made, they retain only ten sounds, rendered within the recordings at the precise moments of their intervention in the unfolding of the story. Dialogues and musics have been systematically excluded in order to keep only the noises, usually stealthy and incisive, representative of the ambiances of the various films and dramatic events related in them.

Broadcast simultaneously and in an ungated manner from ten listening points, each of them marked by the presence of a black sound speaker, the ten soundtracks engage a form of dialogue in their effects of echoes and possible contamination. The network they structure builds a soundscape deployed on the exhibition space, working by juxtaposition of strata and working at depth effects. Unpredictable despite the ostensible presence of black sound speakers which signify their possible intervention and sometimes arising after important periods of silence, the purpose of the scratched sounds is less meant to lend to an attentive form of listening, which would fail because of the rarity of the elements, but cause a feeling of frustration and perplexity among the listeners, to surprise them in their journey as they travel around the exhibition space. As would do opening doors to their imaginations, they are however likely to incarnate, at the detour of a room, in the registers of images of no quality gathered in the exhibition space.

If Ten points out, from a panorama of films made over a period of seventy years, the stylisation of sounds and images at work in cinema, comments, through their articulation from the same literary source, the historical evolution and the geographical specificities of their treatment on screen, drawing up a kind of inventory of the atmospheres characteristic of a particular cinematographic genre, the series comments above all, in the use which is proposed of a material where has been conscientiously erased any representation of human figure, the propensity of certain memories, old images and sensations to arise unexpectedly in our minds and even more our way of managing or accommodating ourselves from a form of guilt that would be related to our history or some of our past actions; to put it another way, Ten refers very directly to the work of our unconscious.

The theme of guilt is one of the main sources of Agatha Christie’s novel. The successive murders carried out by an equally implacable and enigmatic hand – since remaining, until the epilogue, not identifiable despite the narrowing of the field of possibilities -, seem to be related to the way in which each of the characters approaches the memory of a crime he committed before his arrival on the island where he is held captive in the company of nine worrisome congeners whom he knows equally guilty of homicide and of which he knows that one of them will do everything in his power to murder him; It is as if his bad conscience ends up turning against him and forcing him to consider his crime in full light.

It is this propensity of a particular situation or context to bring out, without being expected, the traces of an individual or collective heritage, which seems to have been modelled in the sound experiment proposed within the installation. And this possible experience of the work of the unconscious that seems scripted there.

10
(2018)

9
(2018)

8
(2018)

7
(2018)

6
(2018)

5
(2018)

4
(2018)

3
(2018)

2
(2018)

1
(2018)

Copyright © 2016 Laurent Fiévet