PHI Center | Born and died in 30 minutes

The PHI Center presents Last minute, a new immersive installation by the French visual artist duo Adrien M & Claire B. An immersive experience that evokes the first and last minute of our lives. An artistic production so effective that it is destabilizing. Fragile hearts abstain!

Eric Clement
The Press

Launched in Montpellier, France, last summer, the installation Last minute is one of the most unsettling immersive experiences The Press have seen in recent years. The kind of experience for which one wonders if one is not a little masochistic!

Last minute is a narrative, an aesthetic work, an atmosphere and a source of sensations. The creation was born from an intimate experience, explains Adrien Mondot, artistic director of Adrien M & Claire B. “ Last minute tells the story that we lived almost two years ago. The birth of our last son and the departure of Claire’s father. The subject is to feel our existence on Earth by evoking this passage from one state to another, both at birth and at death. »

Experience Last minute, which lasts thirty (!), lives in socks in a large room of the PHI Center. A room where a translucent panel falling from the ceiling serves as a projection screen, just like the floor. It is also the images broadcast on the floor that are the most immersive. Once the broadcast begins, you can walk around the room, sit down, lie down, dance. Everything is possible.

As for us, the first minutes were particularly difficult. We find ourselves on a bubbling aquatic surface. It’s stirring and frankly destabilizing. Almost to make you seasick. Classical music, with a few pieces on the cello, soothes, but then comes heartbeats — life — which you internalize and which really do not leave you indifferent.

We hear Claire Bardainne talk about the loss of her father. “My father is the landscape. Then a flow invades the space, with violent light effects. Of the spots propel lightning in a noise of drums and regular rhythms.

It was then that the experience was the most disturbing, with a surprising and painful heartache, a sort of temporary motion sickness that several of the journalists present felt. As Adrien Mondot had recommended, the best thing is to close your eyes for short periods of time to lessen the effects. But you end up keeping them open, because the projection is visually impressive and you get used to it. It is perhaps better to have eaten before lending oneself to the experience of Last minutelike when you go by boat on a rough sea!

The soundtrack (composed by Olivier Melanno) and the images suggest this energy linked to the appearance of life and which is evacuated during the last breath. Then comes a moment of silence. Parallel lines streak the ground, begin to move, a tremor like the beginning of something great or the end of everything… Lines that recall the cardiac cycle of systole-diastole. The effect is then less dizzying and just as immersive. A more atmospheric, quieter atmosphere, with minimalist contemporary music, is then essential, but the waves return very quickly! A flow both ascending and horizontal that our movements move thanks to sensors that analyze them.

The ground is covered with foam, the wavelets are back, the music is in contemplation. Last minute ends in relaxation, enveloping effects. A gentle end, in a serene, tranquil environment, ideal before leaving this cinematic, theatrical and symphonic atmosphere without losing your balance!

Last minute welcomes a maximum of 20 people at a time. You can take pictures or videos, as long as you don’t disturb your neighbors with flashes. “It’s important to me that people are at the heart of the project,” says Adrien Mondot. We like families to live the experience. Everyone tells a story. They weave together in the room. I love seeing parents watching their children play in this space during the screening. I find that very touching. »