Grégory Dargent | Soleil d’Hiver

Solo for oud, electronics, magnetic tape and projections | Duration: 1h

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In Soleil d’Hiver, Grégory Dargent explores family heritage, exile and the strange ways memory is passed on from one generation to another.

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In 1961, his father, Philippe, left Algeria by boat at the age of thirteen, during the War of Independence. He never returned to what he had always believed to be his country.

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Born sixteen years later, Grégory Dargent grew up with this story almost entirely unspoken. Years later, he began to question what might have remained of it in him, and why, at the age of twenty, almost by chance, he had chosen the oud as the instrument through which he would make his music.

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What began with loss and mourning gradually became a journey.

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Between 2024 and 2025, he travelled through Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq with his oud, cameras and recording equipment, encountering contemporary Arab worlds while following the traces of a history that was both intimate and inherited.

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Along the way, a nostalgia that had long remained blind and silent began to take shape.

On stage, oud, electronics and magnetic tape meet photographs and analogue films shot in 35mm, Super 8 and 16mm. Images appear, disappear and transform, while sounds accumulate, erode and return.

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Soleil d’Hiver does not attempt to reconstruct the past.

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It asks what remains of it.

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Fragments, landscapes, gestures, absences.

And how, through art, an inherited memory can finally become sound and image.