Il suono delle pietre – 1

In the silence of an old chapel, at the Chapelle Sainte Anne Gallery in Tours-La Riche, Marine Aïello and Alain Quesnel have created a minimalist yet deeply evocative installation: elongated ceramic pieces, suspended by discreet threads and pierced at their tips, slowly release drops of water… This installation is part of their four-handed exhibition Il Suono delle pietre. 

The work is simply titled Surplomb — a name that is at once literal, descriptive, and an invitation to step back, to shift perspective. The ceramics, seemingly levitating, create an impression of lightness and suspension. Beneath them, small lead basins placed on the floor collect the water dripping from the suspended forms. The choice of lead intensifies the mystery and material presence. The sound of water droplets falling into the basins, amplified and echoed through the space, becomes the beating heart of the piece. This slow, steady rhythm of dripping water resonates throughout the room, enhancing the meditative and immersive quality of the experience. The work explores themes of time, memory, and transformation, using sound, light, and material to craft a unique and poetic atmosphere.

This is not merely an installation to be looked at. It is a work to be listened to, waited for, almost endured. Each drop is a punctuation in silence, a trace of passing time, a memory spilling forth.

The two artists play with contrasts: suspended lightness against the gravity and weight of lead; the fragility of ceramic against the toxicity of metal; the sacredness of the site against the raw materiality of the elements. This interplay of tensions creates an atmosphere that is meditative — and perhaps also slightly unsettling, even disquieting.

Between temporality and ritual… The work questions our relationship to time and memory. Each drop is a unit of duration, a metaphor for the present dissolving into the past. Lead, heavy and toxic, becomes the vessel of memory: it absorbs time, contains it, but does not purify it.

One might see in it an allegory of the human body: the suspended ceramic as a head or consciousness, the lead as the body that receives, suffers, endures — echoing our contemporary obsessions: the fleeing of time, the infiltration of memory, the invisible weight of days. The amplified sound acts as an inner resonance, a heightened awareness of each passing moment.

The work also evokes ritual: the rhythm of the drops recalls a rite or purification ceremony. But here, the ritual is stripped of transcendence — it becomes mechanical, obsessive, almost pathological. It is the ritual of a memory that does not heal, that seeps, drop by drop, into the crevices of the soul.

Surplomb is not a work that seeks to please, but to make one feel. It confronts us with slowness, with waiting, with repetition. It reminds us that time is not a line, but a sedimentation, a distillation of experience. And that sometimes, what falls slowly is what weighs the most.

Through this minimalist and organic device, Marine Aïello and Alain Quesnel offer a meditation on temporality, fragility, and inner resonance. The installation does not aim to represent — it acts, it permeates, it resonates. Drops of memory…