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Between artistic projects and awareness campaigns, Laura Krsmanovic is also a member of the creative collective 254Forest. In September 2020, she created the activist and poetic multidisciplinary project ISOLA exploring the invisible threads that connect us. Have you ever felt like an isolated fragment ? What if our questions actually had a common root ? Separation. Whether from nature, from our relationship to femininity, from our elders, from our dead, etc.
Through these sensitive experiences, her intention is to change the way we look at the living and to arouse emotions that will lead to a more respectful relationship with others, with ourselves and with nature.

Laura Krsmanovic

&#8220;We take our dead with us everywhere, and if they stayed in the cemetery, we&#8217;d know. Life and death are not hermetically separated, and flowing water does not make our lives impervious to mourning.&#8221; (Living with our dead, Delphine Horvilleur)
A universal pillar of the human experience is meditating upon the boundary between life and death : whether a process of reincarnation of the soul, or the mystical portal embodied by the dark yet crossable waters of the Styx river, there are countless myths and philosophies reminding us that those “passed” may still be closer than we think. 
Yet today we seem disconnected from such worldviews in the West. Just as water transforms into air and back, isn&#8217;t it time to rethink the porosity between life and death, and the place of the dead in the world of the living ?
ORA combines pensive electronic compositions interspersed with narrative accounts of how those we have lost continue to inhabit our emotional worlds. A direct line to the great unknown, a telephone booth is situated in the middle of a room awash in spellbinding light, echoing the Wind Phone, installed in Ōtsuchi, Japan after the deadly earthquake in 2011. Like succumbing to a river current, subtle shifts in illumination detach visitors from external reference points, gently plunging them into an atmosphere of calm introspection. Discreetly and privately, visitors are invited to delve into their most intimate emotions inside the booth – some may choose to speak, others may listen in silence, enveloped in the stories and soundscapes. A moment suspended in time and space where the realms of life and death are reconnected using the power of imagination and enactment. ORA invites us to immerse ourselves in the world of the invisible to reshape our perception of death and grief, while holding space for sadness and remembrance.
ISOLA is a multidisciplinary series of works by Laura Krsmanovic that explores the invisible threads that connect us. Preceded by Confinés Dehors, SOMOS, and MAGMA, ORA is the fourth installment in the series. Music is composed by musician Le Motel, mix is done by Christophe Loerke and scenography is designed by the studio Erased.
Creation &amp; artistic direction: Laura Krsmanovic 
Music and sound design: Le Motel 
Set design: Erased Studio 
Lighting programming: Ofer Smilansky 
Mix and editing support: Christophe Loerke 
Photo: Gretar Gunnlaugsson 
Copy and translation: Blurbs

ORA : Listening to our Dead

Grand Manège

David Shongo is a composer and visual artist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He studied Telecommunication and Networks at the Protestant University of Lubumbashi. He is the co-founder of Studio 1960 and artistic director of the Pianos Festival in Kinshasa. His work also explores the symmetrical possibilities that sound and image can have as movements and the poetic charge that each of these movements can carry towards the other. The question of decoloniality is highly present in his works, manifested through the integration of archives from the pre-colonial, post-colonial, and contemporary periods. Thus, Shongo treats colonial archives not merely as chronological elements of colonial history, but rather as constants of colonial heritage in the present.

David Shongo

The installation Those Without Whom the Earth Would Not Be the Earth draws inspiration from the reflections of the ecologist Malcolm Ferdinand, who offers a critique of our current approach to the global ecological collapse. Ferdinand highlights a fragmentation between concerns for a better future for our planet on one hand, and an unanswered societal urgency on the other.
The title of the artwork references an excerpt from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by poet Aimé Césaire. In ironic manner, the poet reminds us that those who suffer from systems of injustice and exploitative practices are precisely the ones who have taken care of the earth by living in harmony with nature, thus not contributing to its destruction.
The work is set in the context of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been a coveted and exploited space since Belgian colonization due to its rich biodiversity and mineral resources. This historical and international covetousness has turned the DR Congo into a site of permanent conflict, social injustice and ecological threats, with its ecological footprint ranking highest globally. The artist establishes an analogy between ecological toxicity (resulting from abusive exploitation of the land and subsoil) and social toxicity in his country characterized by economic inequality and an unjust system.

Those Without Whom the Earth Would Not Be the Earth

Delta

For more than 15 years, the artist Martin Messier has created artworks in which sound art meets light, robotic and video. In the form of performances and installations, these works place the body front and center.
After studying composition at l’Université de Montréal, Martin began an experimental sound practice that integrated video images. He quickly developed performative audiovisual apparatuses that brought everyday objects and the sound potential of their various materials to the stage.
A number of collaborative projects were carried out over the years, notably with artists Nicolas Bernier, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Anne Thériault, and Jacques Poulin-Denis.
Martin Messier’s latest works include Innervision (2019), a monumental outdoor project performed by 60 dancers, the audiovisual performance Echo Chamber, the choreographic performance Con Sordina, and the light and sound performance Elusive Matter.
Presented in some 50 countries, Martin Messier’s productions have received several prizes and nominations : a special mention at Prix Ars Electronica in 2010 ; listed for a Prix Opus in 2012 ; Best Experimental Short Film at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival in 2013 ; the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in 2014 ; a special mention by the jury at the 2015 Japan Media Awards ; the World OMOSIROI Award in Japan in 2018 ; and in 2021, the 2nd Prize at Athens Digital Arts Festival.
In 2010, he established 14 lieux, a company dedicated to producing performative and installative artworks, and has been its general and artistic director since then.
He lives and works in Montreal.

Martin Messier

Cycles is an installation where everyone is invited to become aware of the relationships linking cyclical and unpredictable phenomena. Harmony and chaos call out to each other in this space where the eight strings of light dance and unfold.
Despite the vivacity of its propulsion, the wire leaves an impression of floating. By marking the nuance between the purity of this suspended movement and the violence of the mechanism that fecundates it, the work proposes an experience where infinity cohabits with the restarts that are part of it.
These dialogues are also found in the sound space : the tuned engines envelop the music diffused with their elusive timbres and draw this landscape in which the harmony is built as much by its power as by its vulnerability.
Concept, audiovisual composition, programming : Martin Messier
Design, hardware : David Gardener
First phase of research : Maxime Damecour, Robocut
Technicians 
Lilian Guiran, Francis Vaillancourt-Martin
Production : 14 lieux