Photography & Sound Exhibition

RÉSONANCES - an immersive experience   

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Peggy Herbeau & Christophe Fillieule (photography)

Chrysanthos Antoniou & Savvas Karantzias (composition)

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Touring (dates and locations):
Website of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, as a preview, from June 2025: https://www.epcc.ee/
European Polyphony Festival Paris (France), Parc Floral de Paris, July 5 – September 28, 2025
European Polyphony Festival, Rhodes (Greece), Museum of Modern Greek Art, September 28 – October 11, 2026

 

An exhibition about disability and sensory subjectivity, Resonances offers a transdisciplinary artistic experience, bridging photography and musical composition. It becomes a space of immersive exploration that sparks imagination, introspection, and a sense of shared experience.

At the heart of this project is Greek composer Savvas Karantzias, who lives with a disability. He serves as the catalyst for an aesthetic experience:
How can disability be represented without fixing, reducing, or distorting it?
How can an alternative way of being in the world be translated through shared artistic and sensory experience, rather than from a clinical or documentary perspective rooted in able-bodied viewpoints?

 

#1 Beginnings: Foundational Encounters

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Over several years, a collaboration has emerged between the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the European Polyphony Festival, supported by the Arts Spontanés (Paris) and Ars Artis (Rhodes) associations. Based on a shared vision of contemporary creation, this artistic partnership has naturally led to the development of an ambitious multidisciplinary project: “Rhodes–Reval”, to be held in Tallinn in November 2024. Conceived as a space for intercultural dialogue, research, and experimentation, it brings together French, Greek, and Estonian artists.

As part of this exchange, the work Katharsis—composed by Savvas Karantzias for mixed choir, percussion, and solo violin—is performed in Rhodes on October 6, 2024, and in Tallinn on November 23, 2024. This contemporary mass subtly blends the sound worlds of Estonia and Greece. It is dedicated to Arvo Pärt and Veljo Tormis, to the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and to Tõnu Kaljuste.

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#2 Collective Residency: Seeking Inspiration, Capturing Reality

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The Resonances exhibition emerged from the meeting of four artists around two expressive forms: photography and music. During a shared artistic residency, held alongside the “Rhodes–Reval” event, photographers Peggy Herbeau and Christophe Fillieule, sound sculptor and violinist Chrysanthos Antoniou, and composer Savvas Karantzias developed the foundations of their work.

The exhibition traces Karantzias’ time in Tallinn, where, despite his disability, he worked on the creation of Katharsis with one of the most prestigious choirs in the world. His journey became a springboard for collective artistic exploration.

The residency in Estonia provided raw material for the works: visual and sonic fragments of real life—traces of travel, daily routines, human and artistic encounters—that also reveal creative impulses and moments of personal transcendence.

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#3 A Time for Creation: Transforming, Designing, Reframing Boundaries

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From this collected material, the artists imagined, transformed, and reshaped their works—applying sensory shifts, material alterations, and aesthetic choices.

The photographers took a bold approach: by deliberately blurring focus, they altered image legibility, symbolically placing the viewer in a visually impaired perspective. This technical device reverses the traditional subject-observer relationship, activating the viewer’s memory, imagination, emotion, and reflection. By stepping away from normative vision, a new interpretation of disability emerges, sparking unexpected dialogue and reshaping lived reality.

Meanwhile, the composers created a sonic repertoire attuned to a living environment: the city of Tallinn at the start of winter, and the emotional and artistic imprint of the residency.

Savvas Karantzias’ compositions are infused with excerpts from Katharsis, intertwining Greek tradition with Estonian music. Added to these fragments—performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir—are concrete sounds that subtly evoke the presence of the composer himself, his experience of reality and disability, and his sensitive listening to the world.

Chrysanthos Antoniou offers a distinct perspective through his explorations, resulting in more experimental pieces. His sound sculptures blend field recordings, electronic elements, instruments like violin and voice—reimagined to echo certain visual elements. His compositional intuition and sound work (blurring, phasing, mixing, stretching) offer a musical space to be felt, imagined, inhabited.

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Photography and sound compositions are intertwined, interacting to form an artistic proposal and sensory experience at the crossroads of the visible and the audible.

 

#4 Immersion: Giving the Works a New Dimension

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Each photograph is paired with an original sound piece. Together, they form a “sono-visualization”—a hybrid object enabling the simultaneous experience of image and sound. The viewer’s experience is instantly enriched: the image is enhanced, expanded, or transformed by sound—or conversely, sound perception is altered by the visual.

There is vast diversity in how we relate to our senses. Resonances aims to give free rein to this diversity of perception.

These two dimensions create a feeling of immersion within the works: musical extension of the visual experience, heightened detail perception, animation of still images, contradiction, illumination, obscuring, the impression of movement…

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Resonances invites imagination and offers a new, alternative dimension to the initial interpretation of the works. It encourages us to reflect on perception when it is altered, enriched, transformed, or hindered—without ever diminishing the artistic experience.

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