La Confluence

La Confluence emerges from the image of rivers meeting seas — a metaphor for bodies in motion, displaced histories, and identities shaped through passage rather than arrival. The work reflects on migration not as a linear journey from one place to another but as a continual state of becoming, where borders blur and belonging remains unstable.

It is in four movements — Gathering Currents · La Confluence · Avalanche · What Remains — for soprano, flute, pipa, violin, double bass, a pianist working inside the instrument with e-bow and superball mallet, and a live video layer. Drawing on breath, noise, resonance and fragile sonic gestures, the piece centres the body as a site of memory and resistance. The voice — moving between text, whisper and raw sound, returning again and again to the line when the river meets the sea — carries traces of those who cross, escape and re-form themselves in transit. Sound behaves like fluid matter, sometimes suspended, sometimes accumulating force; precision and freedom coexist, and there is no click track — the players cue one another across the surface of the image.

The video coexists with the ensemble as a parallel witness rather than illustration: ink-blue current and bone-white particle flow, two rivers converging toward a gold point and then dispersing into residue. Together, sound and image construct a feminist ritual space — one that resists spectacle and foregrounds vulnerability, persistence and collective listening. In La Confluence displacement is not framed as loss alone but as a condition that generates new forms of relation. What gathers here is not a unified voice but a plurality — overlapping, unstable, and insistently present. Written in Paris and Strasbourg in 2025, it was premiered on 23 June 2026 at the Abeceda Festival, Bled.