Plier Plastique pour ciel is a work for soprano, actor, and ensemble, built around a newly commissioned text by French writer Mathieu Nuss. Structured in three continuous movements — Attestation du disparu, Chroniques d’un lendemain, and À propos de la limite du bleu — the piece unfolds as a discontinuous journey through fragmented textual vignettes. These passages combine the observation of contemporary environmental phenomena with a poetics of detail, notation, and lexical drift.
Nuss’s text, far from linear or argumentative discourse, accumulates visions, residues, and glimmers of a world in flux: micro-narratives of ecosystems in crisis, inventories of endangered beings, and almost scientific notations interrupted by surreal, absurd, or hallucinatory images. A coffee stirrer in a plastic cup, a giraffe leaning against a building, drifting cetaceans, buzzing insects, a sea turning to vinegar — these are just some of the composite images through which the world appears at once tangible and unstable, saturated with signs.
Musically, the work moves through the various vignettes proposed by the text, traversing zones of suspended contemplation, distance, or apathy — questioning passivity as an individual response to ecological collapse — and shifting into more intense moments of rupture and imbalance. These contrasting states reflect possible reactions to the helplessness, anger, or unease one may experience when faced with a reality that feels overwhelming or ungraspable.
Rather than delivering a clear or singular message about the state of the world, Plier Plastique pour ciel seeks to render perceptible a plurality of perceptual modes: zones of uncertainty, spaces of resistance, and moments of exhaustion. What is at stake is less the expression of emotion than the activation of language and sound in response to an unstable reality — an attempt, through the medium of sound, to bring forth fragmented forms of perception that resonate with the ambiguities of our relationship to the natural world.
