Innervision

Opening performance Transart Festival on 11 September 2025
at 20:30 & 21:30

A living sculpture takes shape with 62 dancers, each facing an amplified light table, and guided live by Martin Messier. At the heart of this human wave that passes through and encompasses the audience, each performer follows the artist's instructions, as if carried by an inner voice, oscillating between obedience and free will. Dressed in black, the performers merge into a pulsating collective body, swelling, shrinking, advancing or collapsing, embodying the power and malleability of the social body.

In this vast choreographic device, the dancers hold a stone, symbolizing raw material and original nature. Their simple, repetitive gestures - rubbing, throwing, catching - evoke both a return to our roots and a harbinger of humanity's future struggles. In a space saturated with technology, this visceral, prophetic performance returns us to the timeless power of nature and the weight of our collective heritage.

Innervision
Martin Messier
Transart Festival

18 September 2025 from 21:45 until midnight
19 September 2025 from 9:00 until 15:00

With Elusive Matter, a minimalist sound and light performance, Martin Messier transforms simple wisps of smoke into a veritable projection screen. In a room plunged into darkness, armed only with a projector as a source of light, the artist creates tableaux in an intangible mist: a myriad of ghostly spaces, architectural forms and dreamlike images take shape in the mist, suspended just a few centimetres above the viewer's head. This proximity of matter creates the illusion of a moving space, blurring spatial reference points.

Exploring the boundary between the tangible and the intangible, Elusive Matter brings light and sound into tension to generate atmospheres that are both ethereal and soothing. Guided by the search for an immaterial device, Martin Messier creates a sensory universe where matter fades away to make way for an experience oscillating between presence and absence, intangible beauty and dream.

Elusive Matter
Martin Messier
Transart Festival

Field is based on the idea that sounds can emerge from the electromagnetic fields that are omnipresent in our environment. This performance reveals these invisible forces, essential and imperceptible to the eye and ear, which orchestrate our gestures and movements.

Residual electrical signals are picked up by electromagnetic transducer microphones. Recorded beforehand, they then become Martin Messier's raw materials. On stage, the artist interacts with two aluminum panels, linked by a network of cables that he continually connects and disconnects, generating a choreography of sound and light. From these repeated gestures, a hypnotic composition emerges. Evolving in an infinite loop, each iteration, though familiar, is different. The visual power of the work, evoked by electrical conduction and lightning-like flashes of light, plunges viewers into a state of fascination. This revelation of electromagnetic forces brings us closer to their mystery, making the inaccessible tangible.

With surgical synchronization of light and sound, and shadow effects that animate a constantly changing landscape, Field is a landmark project in Martin Messier's artistic research.

Field
Martin Messier
MA/IN Festival

Sonica is heading to Istanbul for the first time. For four days, audiences in the city’s heart will encounter the bold, boundary-pushing spirit that has established Sonica as an international leader in sonic and visual art.

1 DROP 1000 YEARS - Scientists agree that a drop of water travels the globe in less than 1,000 years. This drop shapes our world: it transports nutrients, heat and living organisms, while regulating our planet's climate and ecosystems. It contributes to the fundamental process of life's equilibrium.

Drawing on data from the Global Conveyor Belt, the vast ocean current that orchestrates the mixing of water from the five oceans and redistributes heat on a global scale, Martin Messier underlines the fundamental role of water as a vital substance. Yet, over the past two centuries, human action has been shaking this fragile balance: the gradual slowing of this ocean current could trigger a major climatic upheaval, threatening the entire chain of life.

In this hypnotic performance, the artist explores the tensions between the global currents that drive planetary equilibrium, and the intimate currents that resonate within each of us. Fifteen suspended devices, veritable kinetic sculptures, orchestrate the flow of water particles in real time, materializing oceanic dynamics. The patterns generated, fed by data such as the temperature and salinity of the Pacific Ocean, intertwine in a visual and sonic choreography. 1 drop 1000 years reveals itself as a masterful, poetic ballet, conveying the fragility of ecosystems and the delicate harmony that binds all things on Earth.

1 DROP 1000 YEARS
Martin Messier
Sonica Istanbul