Pierre Bastien

For more than three decades now, the French musician Pierre Bastien, who divides his time between the Netherlands and Spain, has been perfecting an aesthetic universe that is uniquely his own, a world of instruments that he invents and assembles himself using Meccano and small motors, machine-like and fragile, modest and demiurgic. Although in the past it could take on spectacular proportions, his “Mecanium” is now limited to a derrick-shaped structure to which he adds small mechanisms and other accessories, musical prostheses or not, bows or rubber bands.
A music box whose mesmerizing loops – an effect enhanced by two small lamps that project their demultiplied shadows on the wall – form small miniature symphonies, clattering and clattering, which become concertos when he grips his trumpet – itself subjected to many original and zany treatments.