Soft Power

Louise Vo Tan develops a practice that combines video, installation, and sound composition. Her work explores the tension zones between technology and archaism, between violence and harmony, revealing the invisible mechanisms that govern our societies. She is particularly interested in enclosed, regulated, or inaccessible spaces, where the material and symbolic forms of power are decided.

For her exhibition at Bremond Capela, Louise Vo Tan presents Soft Power, a video and sound installation composed of two cubes. Each contains a screen and speakers, forming together a single work: a nearly operatic stage-like structure in which image and sound intertwine in a nonlinear composition. Connected to a central program, the two modules alternate between synchrony and desynchronization, silence and saturation, producing a living composition that is never the same twice.

The project originates from the artist’s immersion at the Banc National d’Épreuve in Saint-Étienne, the only center in France authorized to test, certify, neutralize, and destroy civilian firearms. Access to this strictly controlled and publicly inaccessible space required extensive applications, negotiations, and preparations. This approach, at the intersection of documentary and performance, is integral to the artist’s process: by seeking to cross these institutional thresholds, Louise Vo Tan exposes herself to the very experience of control and constraint that she films. The administrative traces of these procedures—protocols, emails, forms—constitute a parallel archive, sometimes incorporated into other works.

Within this highly regulated, technical, and secret environment, she films gestures of control, destruction protocols, and the mechanics of domesticated violence. Her images make visible what is normally beyond view: the transformation of objects designed to kill into inert matter, and the paradoxical beauty of gestures meant to contain violence.

The soundtrack, composed by the artist from recordings made on-site, mirrors the rhythm of the neutralization operations: metallic shocks, detonations, and friction become musical material. Through this process of transposition, mechanical violence is transformed into a sensitive language — a way of listening to the world that is both physical and meditative.

Soft Power relies on an algorithmic system generating randomized sequences of images and sounds. The two cubes, alternately active or silent, appear to breathe, as if endowed with a life of their own. The installation thus functions as a machine of perception: an organism that observes, measures, and resonates.

With Soft Power, Louise Vo Tan questions the ways in which our societies exert force in invisible, rationalized, and aesthetic forms. She reveals this subtle power that governs bodies and objects under the guise of security and control. In the gallery space, the viewer is confronted with an experience that is both sensory and political: a meditation on the transformation of violence into spectacle and on the unsettling beauty of power structures.