Interview – Durchlüften 2024 by Humboldt Forum

Vincent Moon: “A weird research on space and time – and how to bend them”

Vincent Moon (Photo: Antje Taiga-Jandrig

If there is one artist who deserves the status of world traveler, it is the French-born, but now truly global Vincent Moon. His “Live Cinémas” have become an integral part of the festival scene, magically combining different cultures in moving images and sounds.

On 9 August, Vincent Moon will perform with Rabih Beaini (Morphine Records) at the Durchlüften Festival at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

Thomas Venker spoke to Vincent Moon during a recent visit to Switzerland.

Rabih Beaini & Vincent Moon  (Photo: Theresa Baumgartner)

Vincent, where do I catch you?

I’m in the mountains of the Appenzell in Switzerland.

You seem to be always traveling. Last time we tried to connect you were in Taiwan, last week when we fixed this date you were in Morocco…

I was almost for like two months traveling around Morocco and doing quite many recordings. I’m always traveling, I’m a nomad, so I don’t have any home. So I just basically have no other choice than traveling. But it’s easy to catch me as well. I’m always connected in a way.

But what does that mean for your artistic practice? Because in a way you are always collecting. That means you also edit and review everything on the road?

Constantly. Basically every night, every morning, everywhere I can. That’s the thing that I’m always entirely focused on: my research work, my editing work, on that just basically never ending roller coaster. Sometimes I do take a few days to just finish properly one project or so on. But I reached a point of like …. sorry for the sound mess, I am in the city of Urnäsch, which has a very special sort of like pagan carnival tradition, it’s crazy, man…. anyway, yes, I’m constantly in movements. I am editing some films from Morocco while I am in Switzerland and sort of like exchanging a few emails about the next trip to Estonia. I integrate a lot of those materials nowadays into my “Live Cinémas” – it really goes back to this sort of very simple ancient idea of the troubadour in a way, I collect from one village to another ancient songs, but also perform them. In a sense I take a song from one village and bring it to the next one, as simple as that. It´s exciting to see this movement of creativity happening in such a sort of like slight displacement, constantly of geographical understandings. I like to transplant or exchange some of those seeds, you could call them musical seeds.

I just played in Lausanne last week in the cathedral at a festival, and some of the material I was using was the material I recorded in the two weeks before in Morocco Next week, I’m playing in Estonia. And most of the material I’m going to use is going to be from the recent travel I’m doing now in Switzerland. It´s this constant evolution mapping of the world where, let’s say, none of the sort of like entirely separated from the others, especially not geographically. It´s a weird research on space and time – and how to bend them. I do not classify them or I’m not able to basically separate them accordingly to what an official approach to culture is. I’m more interested in how they merge in general and how they merge through my own experience of reality, obviously. It’s a very subjective form of collecting music and dances.

What I wonder, Vincent, how do you find what you are looking for in this enormous archive you must have after more than ten years of constant travels?

Maybe I should explain first what the “Live Cinéma” means to me.
Have you experienced one?

I only had the chance to see you as part of CTM Festival like ten years ago?

Interesting. The CTM was my first performance ever. So basically it was a catastrophe. It was horrible but it was really funny. I’m still ashamed about it now in a way. I just quickly learned an instrument and suddenly you’re in front of many people and have to perform.
Now I am already doing this for 10 years – documenting and presenting my research in the form of improvised “Live Cinéma” performances.
So, yes, I have an archive – an open archive – on my computer of more than 1,000 films.

Insane.

I don’t really count. I think I’ve made around 1,200, 1300 now. I do make more than 100 films a year now for the past few years. They’re just like small sequences, the files are not really properly cut in terms of short loops or anything, they are from five minutes to 15 minutes. Also the post-production process is much more simplified because I do mostly work around the plain sequence, I don’t really try to build a story. I just basically try to open my camera and catch the movement – the story is the musical or ritualistic happening.
So I pick up on spot one moment of the film. It might be a movement of a hand, it might be just a shaman singing for a tree, or it might be a preparation of some plants. I kind of try to basically overlay them and try to connect them on the spot, and try to build some sort of dialogues in between footages which have been recorded, let’s say in Taiwan in February and footages recorded in Ethiopia more than 12 years ago. And in a way, it connects. It always kind of connects. You always find a level of interconnectivity between those apparently very distant forms of expression. And that’s what I’m excited about.
To explore this on the spot means that usually I perform around one hour, but I do also make much larger performances of like six, eight hours , even longer… sometimes because I’m interested in the length that you develop to put the viewer, the listener in another state of consciousness, obviously.

I see, you make all this on the spot.

Yeah. Most of the time it works, which is quite interesting. I’m always excited about those weird encounters with reality. That’s my approach to reality. That’s also my understanding of reality, which is definitely not materialistic or rationalistic, let’s say. I’m interested in exploring the magic behind our technologies, ancient and modern technologies. That’s the way I deal with them.

Vincent, do you have a plan before you travel to a certain place?

A very good example is my recent trip to Morocco. I did not really know before that Morocco is an extremely musical country in terms of its traditions and village. I started to map a little bit the country by terms of musical genres, sounds, movements, dances, ceremonies…
I had a lot of contacts of people who gave me lots of tips, lots of phone numbers. I also started texting with a lot of people a few days before going there. Then I took the road, and then when I took the road, I was improvising from a day to day basis. I was checking on the way to a village if have a phone number in that village and called the person an hour before arriving. And in a very fantastic way – because this is Morocco, a place where people do have another relationship with time – it worked out. In the Western World our relationship with time is much more complex in a way that we do organize ourselves way too much in advance.
To me, what I want to express with documentary filmmaking, is a special approach to cinema, connecting with the people live in the moment. I’m not preparing a film two years in advance, thinking about documenting a lifestyle or a life situation. I rather arrive in a place and I ask what’s happening today? I’m just excited about what’s happening now.

Is this process you just described also reason why you publish your own work under open-source license?
And a second question coming with this: do you make agreements with the people? Like contracts?

No contracts, I entirely believe in the free flow, the confidence in terms of, well, I’m not going to fuck you up, mate. Of course, I explain to everybody the why I’m doing this and why this is open source, which means I don’t make any money on the films. I don’t sell any film. I believe in the open-source ethos, my political background basically made me understand reality as a nonproprietary device. In a sense, anything related to ownership is something that I do not trust. I do not believe anybody owns anything.
I’m just interested in the flow of exchanges, obviously, how do you as a white male European (especially with a French passport), which opens pretty much any door, how do you find a good balance with people who do not have the same privileges or opportunities in terms of materialistic relationship with reality, but which often do have a much deeper relationship to another understanding of creating a non-materialistic, what you might call spiritual understanding of reality. I’ve been very interested in the philosophy of earlier internet pioneers, like Richard Stallman, and people like that, in the way they do understand new technologies, digital age as coming and basically shaking entirely the grounds of our materialistic relationship with reality. How do we embrace it by not making the same mistakes of ownership? Obviously, 35 years later the result is pretty poor. It’s a bit of a shame.
I´m playing the same method of like, no contracts, trust – and I give the film to the people.
And I tell them actually, that they can do anything they want with the films. And I’m making sure that basically, we have a very open access to that recording, and that will let people have access to it.
99% of the time, the people that I film are completely embracing the idea, the only problem might come, of course, when some musicians do have a label behind or are a bit more like worried about their work going, being basically shared, like that.
But the more I was digging into shamanism into forms of magic, that I’ve been researching, like in Brazil, the question became: how do you connect with people who do have much ancient ways to live? And it seems to me that they all have actually a much more open-source approach to reality than we do have in the Western world.

What’s your perspective on this whole cultural appropriation debate happening over the last years? I mean, one could argue that you, a French person, is kind of taking all this inspiration and materials from people all over the world and creates an artistic identity with them.

It´s a very complex and very simple debate. Basically, first to treat cultural appropriation, you have to determine what is culture and what is ownership, right? If in my case, you do not believe in ownership, and you kind of like disagree with the idea of culture, obviously, the idea of cultural appropriation is a bit tricky. In a sense, a lot of the people that I have been recording around the world do not approach reality in terms of culture. That’s a very important thing to understand. They do not see themselves as culturally separated from something else, from other cultures. I think that’s a very Western-based approach to reality. So in a sense, again, I think the idea of ownership is extremely criticisable regarding the way that lots of people still live on this planet.
That’s something I’ve been really interested to explore, how do you break down the idea of the cultural appropriation and engage in a much more subtle, spiritually and technologically inclined relationship with reality? I’m just very interested in the ethos of more ancient ways of looking at reality in that sense – in that term, like, let’s say cultural appropriation is a bit of a funny twist from the modern world on that.

Let me come back to your French heritage again. Do you feel that over the years and by traveling so much and by rarely being home in France your perspective towards the world changed? Do you still look at the world like a French person or more likely like a world citizen?

I mean, what are you made of. You’re made of your own upbringing; you’re made of the early years in your family and their values and so on. But at some point, you start to be made of encounters. And those encounters, little by little, they change you. I’m almost 45 years old, so I’ve been going through a lot of different encounters. In a sense, I still have that base of growing up in a French society with its own values, with its own views on especially on art forms and so on, which I find very limited, to be honest with you, and very separative – but little by little I was made of other stuff. I was made of my encounter with the plants, for example, which has been drastically changing my relationship with reality, my experiences in various forms of shamanism from a lot of research on Ayahuasca and lots of films on Ayahuasca in the Amazon. I got initiated in Iboga in the Bwiti tradition in Gabon. I got really deep in very various forms of magical relationship with reality. That makes you as well, that adds layers to you.
By the way: I don’t believe I was mentioning the word “death” earlier on regarding recording, because I feel there’s a deep, there’s an obvious link between a death-frightening society and a society which is basically overloaded with recordings. That´s something we should kind of always keep an eye on: How do we not burden our entire relationship with reality with so many recordings of its own reality.
I don’t believe that anything disappears. I don’t think anything dies properly. Death is not the end. That’s for sure.
And so, in that sense, I’m still the French little dude, but on top of that, there’s so many layers of interaction, of encounters, so many other bodies that you meet and you learn from them.
And as you might know Thomas, especially if you’ve been traveling a lot at some point, your body changes without you noticing. It’s not an intellectual process of change.
Your body evolves because of the encounter with other bodies of other so-called cultures. And people are basically slowly influencing the way you look at reality.
So, yeah, you can say citizen of the world.
I think it’s very personal research on reality that I’m having, to be honest with you, my research on cinema is a way for me to basically celebrate all those different musical manifestations and experiences of different forms of ceremonies around the world.

You just mentioned Brazil and the Amazon area, but then again you are also right now in Switzerland.

Switzerland, it’s a very strange place. And not many people fully understand it, because it’s not clear what’s happening here. But looking at the Swiss history in the 20th century, the country basically gave birth to very, very interesting forms of thinking and research on the unconscious. On one hand, you got Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD and completely changed the game. What is the unconscious and how do we dig into it? And on the other hand, Carl Jung, which has been massively important for my own research on reality.
There’s something else, there’s a much, much deeper way to function in reality that I think humankind is barely touching on. I cannot say I’m a buff in quantum physics at all, but I’ve been following quite a lot of stuff.

I think we do have to change our gear in terms of what is reality made of, because this reality we think is made of just doesn’t make sense anymore, we’re just trapped into a massive collapse of everything, all our institutions and so on. And it seems that we have the opportunity to reconnect with the living around us by changing completely our eyes on what is reality made of.
And in a sense, my camera is just a way for me to explore what reality is made of, and the “Live Cinéma” experiences for me is a way to kind of question that as well – how do we tap into our unconscious, how do we generate basically a deeper level of imaginary practices. And I think that’s basically what we’re missing in our society, to reimagine reality. In that sense, I’ve just been interested in the experimental art forms to redefine what made us humans, to redefine what is reality, and to reconnect, obviously, with some of the most ancient, sometimes, philosophies of life.

You were in Taiwan, when we first tried to arrange a Zoom together. At that time the country was under verbal attack by China, not only verbal, there were also military threats actually. What I am pointing to, you were in a country in a moment when the sociopolitical reality of most people there was peaking heavily. Did this have an impact on your research process in the country?

I’m following very much what is going on in politics. While I was in Taiwan, I was very curious to understand what kind of threat China is to the country, sort of like Putin nowadays to Europe. But people live with this in a sense that they do integrate it in their everyday reality. Every time I went in a sort of post-war zone, I was always surprised to realize how much of a dichotomy exists with the way that we look at it from the outside. And obviously, the mass media gives a massive echo on that.
When I ask my friends in Ukraine how life is in these war times? They always say: “Well, life goes on.” I mean, basically people still do their stuff. Probably not in Gaza now though. Yes, there’s a war on top of that. There are bombs falling, but actually people still go out, meet up for drinks, go for coffee, live their love stories. And that’s a very fascinating thing. But we don’t go from one reality to the other. It’s much more complex. I’m interested in that non-dualistic relationship with reality.
And I think obviously, the mass media coverage of the world is doing the exact opposite. It´s always been a war of storytelling, right?
So, in a sense, I’m very concerned about the images we make of the world, because the images we make of the world – much more than in any other time in human history – nowadays are changing reality in return. It’s a feedback loop, which is very fascinating to play with. We’re trapped into this extreme acceleration of dramatization of reality because of the mass media, which is basically a vortex of tragedies. And that in return, well, creates a much more fucked up reality. Don’t get me wrong – let’s face it – like, our institutions, everybody’s falling apart, but people are still living in it. I´m trying to basically bring maybe some other images of reality, like many other artists are doing. And I think that’s basically what we should try, is to approach reality with other angles.
Artistic behavior is a way to reconnect our communities together and realize that there are still many things we can do.

Rabih Beaini & Vincent Moon  (Photo: Theresa Baumgartner)

Vincent, I could keep talking about all these topics on and on, but I don´t wanna take too much of your time. To come to an end, I am interested about your upcoming performance with Rabih Beaini in Berlin for Durchlüften Festival at Humboldt Forum. How did you meet in the first place?

Rabih contacted me actually some years ago, if I’m not wrong, he contacted me because he discovered my work and wanted to do something with me to use it in his own work. And we met actually for the very first time when he invited me for CTM 2016, the edition he was co-curating. At CTM I just showed an installation if I remember correctly at HAU Hebel am Ufer, and performed my first (and very bad!) show on the opening night – our first “Live Cinéma” together happened a few months later in Milano at Terraforma and then two years later again at Unsound Festival. We did a few more shows together since then.
I love Rabih, I think he’s a mastermind of approaching sound in a very interesting way. There’s something about his approach which is very magical. He’s a wizard but without ever falling in obsession with technologies. I think he really understands how to reduce and that’s very much what I’m excited about. He knows how-to just make it simple.

What can we expect for the 2024 reunion?

I think it’s going to be pretty intense because when we play, we like to push it to like really extreme sounds. Usually for the “Live Cinéma” together I mix my own stuff and then all the sounds that comes from it goes into his own machine and he slices it, reshape it live and so on. So it’s going to be pretty radical. I think we are both interested in that modified state of consciousness that you can bring people in.
I have a deep love for harsh noise music, or really, really, really intense noise music, which has been putting me in a state of trance and meditation and contemplation when I was younger. And I did not understand that, but basically in the middle of this concert, which is so fucking loud, suddenly, suddenly you’re still, there is nothing moving around. You go so far into the extremity of noise and you reach silence again. To go from one extreme to the other. That’s what I’m excited about, and I guess that´s what you can expect from us – it is going to be a very physical live set where images and sounds are going to merge ¬ maybe in them.

Thank you for this conversation, Vincent.

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