A Conversation with the Sun (VR)
Project Festival d' Automne, Paris, France, Centre Pompidou

Artists: Apichatpong Weerasethakul 阿彼察邦·韦拉斯哈古 | 

A Conversation with the Sun (VR), the Thai filmmaker's second foray into the realm of performance, uses virtual reality to set up the conditions for a collective dream.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is best known for his penchant for dividing films into two halves. A good example is that of Tropical Malady, in which the narrative of a stormy romance is suddenly interrupted by plunging us into a nightmarish jungle. He has employed a similar structure since his first performance-based creation, Fever Room. Presented at the Festival d'Automne in 2016, it reversed the stage set-up thereby enabling the audience to discover, by means of a screen being lifted up, the rows of empty seats in a gloomy theatre. This new show hinges upon a passage where roles and things are reversed: the visitor goes from being a spectator to an otherworld explorer, being awake gives way to sleep, and heavy bodies suddenly become airborne, light. As the members of the audience put on their virtual reality headsets, they collectively enter into the same dream. For the director, putting on a headset equates to learning to see with your eyes closed and enables us, as in meditation or dreaming, to reach new depths of consciousness. Oscillating between a near-death experience and a return to the origins of life, and carried along by a soundtrack composed by the great Ryūichi Sakamoto, A Conversation with the Sun (VR) invites us to observe the lights of which our memories are made, and to bring back the past in order to free ourselves from it.

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