Julien Discrit – Forever Reverb, 2024

Julien Discrit trained as a geographer. He is interested in physical or biological processes and their technical capacity to generate forms. He questions both their emergence and their representation, seeing them as the result of an experiment. Using a wide range of techniques and materials, his work draws on both geomorphology and neuroscience, all phenomena whose traces make up the artist’s work. His works are to be seen as so many imprints that summon up a memory that is both collective and personal; an experience of time and of a world that is constantly metamorphosing.

Julien Discrit’s installation, presented in the former locomotive repair plant at La Mulatière, revolves around notions of memory and care. It is based on “reminiscence therapy”, a type of psychotherapy for helping people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, clinically defined as the use of objects or environments taken from the past to make them present. Julien Discrit’s work, which is evocative of a Memory Care Centre, takes up its founding principles to propose a futurist version, where memories could be encoded, stored and then recovered. Using images and music generated by artificial intelligence programmes, it plunges the audience into a past that never happened, reconstructed memories, in other words a fiction, in which transparent chips enable memories to be stored and recovered using light therapy. Forever Reverb – Edited memories (1958), filmed in San Diego, USA, takes viewers on a stroll through a care centre with a gigantic set modelled on the 1950s, like an eternal echo of an evanescent golden age.