Canal Saint-Martin
Whatever the way we cross a river or a stream, every time our eyes are briefly drawn to the surface of the water – why is that? No doubt it is because water remains in our memory as the most beautiful image of what stuff life is made of, both liquid, fleeting and still.
Sonia had crossed the Sully Bridge once, ten times, a hundred times; her eyes had been drawn to the music of light coming from the Seine once night has fallen. The rippling water leaves a trace of a gleaming serpent that is now hiding in the reflecting forge of the night. The town and its magic sparkling have been Sonia’s favourite scene since childhood.
One day she got hold of the idea, for the beginning or Art is always some sensation, a plaything for the mind that demands immediate treatment. But it is not the Seine – too romantic – that Sonia chooses to catch with her eyes; urged on by a desire for moving stillness, she tries to find the place where the “elemental animal” hardly moves, where the mirror of nocturnal bustle has learnt to be silent: the canal, whose stillness is almost total, may be the most perfect choice for what she hopes to make manifest.
This ever-changing glowing movement of the night lights, both hiding and revealing the fascinating stillness and the moving drowsiness, becomes even more elusive on the dark surface of this functional and almost dead waterway. The turmoil turns into periodical, identical shapes, all of them different, however. It loses its meaning to melt into the faraway echo of an eternal dance.
Overshadowed by the shimmering lights, it becomes visual music, the melody of the water’s surface singing the city’s song. Augustin d’Assignies slipped his music underneath those colored reflections; he does not illustrate the images which Sonia and Lazhar have captured, but gives the other side to them, exterior to the faraway festival, and makes it into a song of the depths, the troubling voice of dark and still water.
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