Article | MATERIA [Alain Wergifosse] – Immersive installation – text by Philippe Franck (Fr/Be) | Turbulences Video #123 (Fr)

Materia, Alain Wergifosse’s new project premiering at the VIDEOFORMES festival in March 2024, is a large-scale, immersive multi-channel video installation. The Belgian sound and visual artist defines it as “an imaginary voyage of exploration inside matter in all its states and transmutations, navigating liquid phases, flying over gaseous states, penetrating solids, sometimes blinded by brightly colored plasmas or deafened by vibrations”

With a free and poetic eye that he has had from his begin- nings in Barcelona’s underground scene in the 80s to his more recent work back in his native Belgium in 2007, the intention is to illustrate various vibratory phenomena, entropy, and the intimate dynamics of nature and the constantly transforming physical and chemical elements that make it up. This is done through a few interactions between light, sound, and matter in time and space, in a free interpretation of string theory, anti- matter, and thermodynamics.
We also find the attraction of this contemplative artist, for nature in its subjugating abstraction, an escape from everyday reality into a parallel universe that he feels is too often ignored, a “desire to explore the world millimeter by millimeter and share my hallucinatory, sometimes autistic view of this reality that turns its back on banality”. “Everything I capture, using photography and optics, really does exist, like those stained reflections of mist on the window of a bus or the shadows of dust. With digital technology, I recreate my own realities, complex circuits that produce results ever closer to nature itself. It’s a way of seeing the world in its micro-cracks, to kill boredom, a way of traveling anywhere, with or without a computer, letting yourself be hypnotized by things that move, pure movement, where there are no words, no humans, a form of down-to-earth scientific mysticism”

Read in Turbulences Vidéo #123