Loris Gréaud: The Unplayed Notes Factory

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A Venice fantasy

Born in 1979, Paris-based artist Loris Gréaud interweaves art, architecture, and music in his unique practice. His work is characterized by a desire to fuse different fields of knowledge and activity in a manner both futuristic and utopian. His modus operandi is in fact comparable to that of cinematic production (involving collaboration and co-authorship), and he often works with experts from diverse disciplines (including architects and scientists). His work is orientated toward ideas and processes rather than finished form, and his projects are liable to manifest themselves in different ways over time, oscillating between fact and fiction.

The Unplayed Notes Factory, his latest project to date unveiled at the 2017 Venice Biennial, offers the public an immersive installation in which fiction and reality are mixed in a disturbing strangeness. “There is a rumor that an old Murano blown-glass factory, abandoned for more than 60 years, comes back to life at night, awakened by a mysterious production of blown-glass sculptures made from the sand of worn out hourglasses. The ceiling looks like a giant crystal cave, light undulates through the space, and various sounds seem to come from the past life of the factory. Smoke, flames, rain, all agitate without a destination. Frozen in time, the factory seems to dream. But if you walk away, a real maestro and his assistants are working, and furnaces have been reactivated … Maybe they are real ghosts, haunting the factory, which remembers past events and its history … ”
The publication extensively documents the project and brings together essays by renowned art critics Nicolas Bourriaud and Germano Celant.

Loris Gréaud exhibited at the Musée du Louvre and the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2013, at Dallas Contemporary in 2015, and at LACMA in Los Angeles in 2016. He has participated in many group shows such as A Certain State of the World?, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, 2009; Altermodern, Tate Britain, London, 2010; ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale, 2011; X–Sound: John Cage, Nam June Paik and After, Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul, 2012; Art or Sound, Prada Foundation, Venice, 2014.

Published on the occasion of Loris Gréaud’s exhibition The Unplayed Notes Factory at the Venice Biennial (May–November 2017).