ABOUT
Grégory Dargent is a French musician, composer, photographer and filmmaker whose work moves between sound, image, memory and displacement.
Originally coming from jazz and improvised music, he has developed a highly personal approach to the oud, bringing its traditional languages into dialogue with electronics, magnetic tape, noise and contemporary improvisation.
Over the years, sound has increasingly become inseparable from image. Working primarily with analogue photography, Super 8 and 16mm film, Dargent explores what remains after an event: traces, fragments, inherited memories, altered landscapes and disappearing images.
This relationship between personal history and collective memory lies at the heart of works such as H, created around the French nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara, and Soleil d’Hiver, a long-term project combining oud, electronics, photography and film to explore exile, transmission and his family’s relationship with Algeria and the contemporary Arab world.
His current installation project Zone Blanche continues this research through traumatic memory, disappearance and the physical transformation of photographic and film material.
Alongside his personal work, Dargent performs and creates within experimental, improvised and contemporary music scenes in Europe and the Arab world. He has founded and directed projects including Electrik GEM, L’Hijâz’Car, H and TKHT, and has collaborated with artists including Babx, Camélia Jordana, Rachid Taha, Maurice Louca, Abdullah Miniawy, Houria Aïchi, Manu Théron and Frédéric D. Oberland.
His work has been presented internationally, from the Berlin Philharmonie and Le Poisson Rouge in New York to Café OTO in London, Irtijal in Beirut, Cairo Jazz Club, Les Suds à Arles and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.
As a photographer, his work has been exhibited in France and internationally. His first monograph, H, was published by Éditions Saturne, and his new photographic book Soleil d’Hiver was published by Le Mulet in 2026.
Across these different forms, the same questions persist:
What do we inherit?
What disappears?
And what remains?