Et le passé revit le temps d’une visite

Et le passé revit le temps d’une visite (Eng: And the past comes alive again for the span of a visit) is an interdisciplinary project carried out by composer Walter Sallinen and visual artist Markus Jäntti from 2017 to 2022. The concept is based on the origin story of Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 piano work Pictures at an Exhibition, in which he reflected on a visit to a show of works by painter Viktor Hartmann. Jäntti and Sallinen, in turn, mirror this artistic experience by also combining visual art and music/sound.

The artistic result of the project are ten individual videos that each combine a visual piece by Jäntti and a sound piece by Sallinen. The project also includes an audiovisual publication of Jäntti's visual works and Sallinen's compositions with texts commenting the process. The book was published by Argobooks in October 2022. A documentary video work that brought together the visual and sound works created as part of the project was premiered in October 2022 at Kulturhaus Schwartzsche Villa in Berlin.

"Sallinen discovers a drawing of a garden gnome on a cardboard display hidden in the basement boiler room. However, the gnome’s hat is not pointed as usual, rather shaped like a suction plug directed upwards, which in turn is somewhat reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s oversized beret. In Mussorgski’s piece, the gnome; in Jäntti-Tuominen’s piece, the mutated garden gnome; in Sallinen’s piece, the stomping sample sound of an idea of German folk schlager chased through Euro-trash techno..."

– Jörg Heiser