Franck Vigroux & Kurt d’Haeseleer - The Island (Excerpt)

Avant-garde composer and synthesist Franck Vigroux comes together with experimental video artist Kurt d’Haeseleer for The Island, a multisensory reflection on the deep human and geographic upheaval that is the inevitable result of the industrial development of the natural world. The audiovisual concert was inspired by a number of stories of islands and valleys fated for destruction due to the construction of new hydroelectric dams, land masses that would be submerged by the surging power of the newly re-routed water. Three stories from history echo throughout Vigroux and d’Haeseleer’s performance. Back in 1976 the Russian author Valentin Rasputin published Farewell to Matyora, a work of village prose that dealt with the dangers of industrialization, centering on a village located on a small island under threat of flooding due to the construction of a dam attached to a hydroelectric power plant. Sometime later, in 1980, the village of Naussac in the region of Lozère in southern France was submerged