Talk with Boris Labbé and Lucas Fagin about Glass House

At the end of the screening of Glass House, composer Lucas Fagin and director Boris Labbé will discuss their collaboration on the original piece that inspired the project. Conceived as an immersive visual and auditory experience, it was created in June 2023 by the Ensemble Cairn at the Scène nationale d’Orléans and has since been transformed into a medium-length film.

Glass House

The collaboration between Ensemble Cairn and composer Lucas Fagin began in 2015 when, as part of Radio France’s Alla Breve commissions, he composed Psychedelic. Written for seven musicians, Lucas Fagin’s music bridges the gap between so-called “contemporary” and “current” music, drawing inspiration from three highly referenced sources: Ligeti (Kammerkonzert), Pink Floyd (On the Run, from the album Dark Side of the Moon), and a hypnotic painting by Victor Vasarely. The shared desire to delve deeper into this work led Lucas Fagin to propose creating an extended form over time and space, with the collaboration of audiovisual artist Boris Labbé: Glass House.

The meeting of these two artists, who share a taste for distortions, optical illusions, and geometric eccentricities, is intended to be a radical undertaking. Drawing inspiration from the unsettling world of science fiction, their work seeks to alter perception and disorient the senses through a composition that is both visual and sonic, simultaneously hypnotic and psychedelic. Their ambition is to create a new universe, a “Psi-fi” that radiates in multi-dimensions.

Boris Labbé

Trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and then at the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême, the work of Boris Labbé (1987, FR) quickly made the rounds of contemporary art exhibitions, international film festivals or audiovisual concerts. His short film La Chute was included in the selection of the special session of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week. In 2020, he collaborated with choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and designed the video set design for Swan Lake. He won the Main prize at the Venice Biennale for his virtual reality project Ito Meikyu (Sacrebleu Productions).

Based on his drawing activity, Boris Labbé’s work is characterized by hybridization, combining the use of digital moving image techniques with those specific to animated film. This approach, somewhere between tradition and innovation, forms an original and vibrant language, prone to improvisation and the calculation of probabilities, questioning the problems of representation, the relationship between painting and cinema, between music and dance, between the body and animals, plants and minerals.

His videos tend to break out of the spatio-temporal framework imposed by classical cinema; governed by the notion of expanded cinema, his works are not only destined for projection in the movie theater, but also tend towards other forms, notably installations. Boris Labbé creates a cinema without direct shooting, without actors, without characters, without dialogue, and whose narration, often dilated, remains open to the spectator’s interpretation. This apparent minimalism paves the way to maximums, with each project seeking its culmination until a certain form of depletion of the cinematic means deployed.

Boris Labbé’s work forms a cinema of multiplicity. Repetition, re-presentation, collages, patterns, metamorphoses, perpetual movement, as well as constant citations of art history, literature and philosophy, have all become essential resources of his audiovisual language.

Lucas Fagin

Lucas Fagin was born in 1980 in Argentina. He is a composer, keyboard and guitar player living in Paris and Buenos Aires. Until 2003, during the Buenos Aires period, he was an outsider while he studied with Daniel Montes, Ricardo Martinez and Aldo Antognazzi. Later, he decided to go to France where he studied composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris with Marco Stroppa, Stefano Gervasoni and Luis Naón. 

During the last years he had commissions by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ars Musica Festival, Teatro Colón Argentina (CETC), French State, Teatro Argentino de La Plata, Trio KDM, Radio France, GRM, Ensemble LeBalcon, Ciclo de Conciertos Teatro San Martin, etc.

He is focus both in instrumental and electronic music. Some of the main features of his work are the instrumental and electronic spatialisation, the use of noise giving noise mixed or orchestrated with pitch, the treatment of sound as a plastic material, the mix and use of ordinary objects alongside with traditional instruments for creating an abstract and contextless sound world or the use of visual images to structure his sonic ideas. In most part of his work there are almost no either signs or reference points tending to build columns in time, the bridges of memory are destroyed.

His opera La Libertad Total based on a novel by Pablo Katchadjian was premiered on october 2014 opening the Buenos Aires Contemporary Music Festival with stage setting by Mariano Tenconi Blanco.
In 2023, with visual artist Boris Labbé, they created Glass House for ensemble and video, a multidimensional and super virtuoso 40-minute work, a radiant and hypnotic psi-fi trail combining subtlety and the most radical ruptures.

During the year 2016-2017 he was composer in residence at Académie de France à Madrid, Casa de Velazquez. He won more than 20 international and national prizes.