Étienne Rey FR
Impermanence
Installation
” Souffles terrestres “ Exhibition
From October 24th to December 13th
Tuesday to Sunday, 9am to 6pm
Centre de la Vieille Charité
Marseille
Credits
A CHRONIQUES CRÉATIONS platform project
Co-production: GMEM – National Center for Musical Creation, ]interstice[ Festival, Station Mir, Ososphère.
Partners: INSA Rouen Normandie, Oblique/s, Sylvain Garnavault (The Bearded Lab), CORIA Laboratory (University of Rouen).
Artistic Team: Etienne Rey, Visual Artist.
Max Bruckert: Composer
Julien Réveillon, Hakim Hamdani: Scientists.
Manœuvre: Builder, S
ylvain Garnavault: Mechatronics Design.
Project Development and Networking: oblique/s.
Technical Coordination: manœuvre.
An art/science project created as part of the City of Caen’s 2025 Millennium Celebration
“Impermanence ” is a sculptural, visual, and sound installation composed of five water sculptures in a state of perpetual recombination. The work explores resonance as a fundamental principle, drawing on cyclical and wave-like phenomena resulting from the interaction between matter, gravity, and a mechatronic language of movement. Inspired by a seismic event in Greenland, it transposes vibrational dynamics—from which forms, sounds, and instabilities emerge—to a perceptible scale.
Linked to the concept of resistance, *Impermanence* draws attention to fragile balances and the forces at work in the world. In the face of ecological upheavals and logics of domination, the work offers a perceptual experience grounded in coexistence, listening, and transformation. Conceived as a continuum between the visible and the audible, it transforms resonance into a space of experience: the movements of water, sound vibrations, and mechanical cycles come together to form an unstable landscape, where resistance takes the form of heightened attention to the balances of living things.
Etienne Rey
Etienne Rey’s work explores the very notion of space. The challenge is to produce a shift in perception. The question of the place and the environment, of the in situ and the architecture participate in the discovery of spatial structures. The work is perceptual, it is approached without any particular knowledge, in a search for universality. Each of his installations explores a phenomenological experience, and unfolds spaces, sometimes unstable, where everything evolves permanently according to the position of the observer, his point of view, his movements.
