MATTHIEU BAUMANN

LIGHTING AND SET DESIGNER

Matthieu Baumann is a versatile artist who uses light, sound and space to create unique visual and sonic worlds. His artistic career, which began in alternative music circles, has led him to learn the art of lighting, particularly for the performing arts. His sound installations are rooted in the tension between technological evolution and nostalgia for older technologies. Matthieu sees this as a powerful way of questioning the speed of technological change and the way it impacts on our relationship with everyday objects. As a lighting designer, he creates delicate devices that effectively reinforce the narrative. His poetic style harmoniously blends the useful with the aesthetic, and the industrial with the natural. In recent years, he has devoted himself to recovering abandoned lights, giving them a second life in a world where technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, sometimes to the detriment of simple, authentic beauty.

AGNÈS GAYRAUD

AUTHOR

Agnès Gayraud is a musician, songwriter and composer in a progressive pop band she founded in 2011, La Féline. She also plays noisy guitar and airy vocals in the group GRIVE. An Agrégée and Doctor of Philosophy (with a thesis on T. W. Adorno), in 2018 she published Dialectique de la pop (La Découverte), a critical philosophical investigation into the aesthetic meanings of recorded popular music. For this edition of the Ensemble Contrechamps programme, she proposes a free path through different forms of passage, leaps, circulations or risk-taking within the musical and sound field, a subjective echo of what the Ensemble's musical adventures give us to hear.

YVONNE HARDER

SET DESIGNER AND RECEPTION

Yvonne Harder is a critic of life and sometimes has good ideas.
She lives mainly in Geneva, sometimes elsewhere, tinkers with sets, sings serious but also silly lyrics, sometimes goes off to pick wild vegetables in border areas and loves what she does, although nothing can replace her screwdriver in her heart. Contrary to existing hierarchies, her only career plan is to do interesting projects with people she loves and admires, which she does not do so badly.