A new album from the Seefeel group, the Youssef Nabil exhibition in Orsay, a novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine… Madame Figaro’s culture week

Seefeel au feeling

While waiting for the return, at the end of May, of the legendary electronic duo Boards of Canada, the new album by another English group, also legendary, has just arrived. Born in the 1990s, with music mixing electronics, rock and dub, Seefeel operates between song and abstraction, creating ethereal music, sparse with muffled and flexible rhythms. Here, the group wanders through vignettes ideal for film music. But then a film that we would watch when returning from a long night, at a time when sleep is unable to establish itself. After listening, we are captivated by this sound universe, which sculpts the atmosphere while invading it, calmly, deeply, irresistibly. J. G. 
“Sol.Hz”, Warp Records.

The Egypt of Youssef Nabil

At the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, the orientalist gallery takes on the colors of the Mediterranean with “To Dream Again”, a vast journey through the work of the Franco-Egyptian photographer and videographer Youssef Nabil, born in Cairo in 1972. Organized in As part of the Mediterranean Season and the Bicentenary of photography, the exhibition tells in five stages the journey of an artist who made the sea a territory of memory, exile and reverie more than borders. Since the 1990s, Youssef Nabil has been building a. Immediately recognizable work: black and white shots, meticulously colored by hand like the posters and films of old Egyptian cinema. His luminous blue prints, enveloped in velvety tones, seem to emerge from a sensual Orient, free from censorship and identity assignments. Melancholy, often from behind, his self-portraits stand on the threshold of departure, in a dreamed Mediterranean world, constantly left and found again. The Musée d’Orsay played a big role in the artist’s training: his discovery of the collections at the age of 20, in 1992, remains a founding shock that we find even in The Dream (2021), self-portrait echoing the Dream by Puvis de Chavannes. From room to room, his works dialogue with symbolist paintings and 19th century perspectives on Egypt, moving historical orientalism towards an intimate, poetic space, where the Mediterranean becomes a geographical and mental horizon. L. C. 
Youssef Nabil. De rêver encore», du 19 mai au 13 septembre, au Musée d’Orsay, à Paris. museum-orsay.fr

A prisoner queen

Skip the ad

In his novel Eleanor of Aquitaine. There was evening, and there was morningComing in 2022, Marie-Noëlle Demay (director and chef de F, the Figaro art of living) was already attached to the Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitiers, wife of the King of France, then the King of England, and mother of ten children, including the famous Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland. She recounted the journey undertaken at the age of 75 by Eleanor to look for her granddaughter Blanca and bring her back in her new country, France, the latter would reign there under the name of Blanche de Castille and give birth to the future Saint Louis. Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Captivethe author goes back almost thirty years, to 1173. The day after her revolt against her husband Henry II of England and when she had rallied her sons and a number of nobles to her cause, Eleanor was taken prisoner and placed under house arrest for fifteen years… After leading a grand style, surrounded by troubadours and minstrels in a brilliant court, and concentrating extraordinary power in her hands, she finds herself alone and deprived of everything in the British countryside, while news of intrigues and wars reach her from afar. Marie-Noëlle Demay breathes flesh and life into her story thanks to a language as rhythmic as it is picturesque, strewn with just the right amount of medieval terms, which speaks of the passion, the ardor and the brilliance of a woman who is learning to conquer a new form of freedom. Giving voice to her heroine, but also to her royal offspring through epistolary exchanges, she signs a historical novel which travels despite being behind closed doors. We would see it completely adapted on stage, like Marie Stuart with Adjani. M. T. H.
Aliénor d’Aquitaine. Captivede Marie-Noëlle Demay, Éditions Les Presses de la Cité, 384 p., 22 €.