MORPHOSIS — vincent masson

MORPHOSIS

Videomapping
Duration 13min
Cathedrale Saint Etienne
Festival Constellations, Metz
2019

Director: Vincent Masson
Music: Collectif Sin (Guillaume Lantonnet, Gaspar Claus)
Lights: Loic Marrafini
Production: La Maison Production
Captation video: Guig’s timelapse

Morphosis (or morphing) is the visual process that allows the passage from one image to another by modulating it.

It is related to the transformation, or formation, of an organism.
It is an interaction, a link between two images, a transition of matter and time.

The light, which runs through the cathedral, transforms it throughout the day.
The windows, which offer him a passage, are the interface of this transformation. They combine the inside and the outside in a game of infinite metamorphoses, they are a meeting place between two spaces.
They are a membrane at the heart of a story between light, movement, time and narration

This material is an interface between everyday moments, historical events, architectural spaces, narrations.

Morphosis shows the polymorphic character of the building, modulated by its own historical narration.
Just as stained glass, as a narrative material, transforms light, experience reformulates some historical events in contact with the building. It gives them new forms and temporalities.
Light becomes here a "cultural matter", composed of the historical evolutions of the city of Metz.
The cathedral, this “Lantern of the Good God”, becomes a surface plural of history(ies), metamorphosing to meet them.
In order to highlight this relationship with the light, which continually sculpts the appearance of the building, the whole experience follows the chromatic evolution of it during the day.

Morphosis puts these events in friction with the rhythm of the impermanence and the constant change of state, inherent to our current societies. This confrontation shows the Saint-Etienne cathedral as an organic structure made up of multiple histories, in continual transformations and with plural temporalities.

“Morphosis tackles the bond that unites the light, the surface of the windows and St. Etienne Cathedral, in a game of endless metamorphoses. Intense visual experience, this creation retains a heritage anchorage strong, by reproducing in its composition the flagship events of the history of Metz, from the legend of Graoully to the construction of the Center Pompidou.
Morphosis, a vision at the same time organic, mechanical and poetic cultural heritage of the city of Metz.”