Designinga musical show for young audiences is a necessity - and even a duty - for a music creation center like ours. We can't simply produce the music of today without making a young audience aware of it.

Questions of transmission and heritage are at the heart of the Art Zoyd Studios project, heir to the Art Zoyd group, dissolved following the death of its composer Gérard Hourbette in 2018.

Like the miners of Arenberg who tirelessly content their history, since 2018 we have been building up archives, reassembling pieces, so that musical history continues to be written in the present, in awareness of its own memory.

We have thus developed a research, transmission and preservation section dedicated to electronic music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The similarity with the mining basin was obvious.

It's hard not to be touched by this miner who says he'll talk about the mine until he dies, and then, when he's gone, he'll have to go on, so that the children will know... Because you can't build a life without memory, you can't become an adult without history...

Here in Arenberg - the project's starting point - we're faced with history, with an impressive and well-preserved material heritage, but also with the men and women who made the Mine: some of them lead tours and proudly recount their past.

What will we remember? What will we retain of these human stories, of these bodies of men and women inscribed in the great epic of the Mine?

This project is above all musical, because music remains our language and our area of expertise.

In the show, text by Jean-Michel Espitallier and video by Victor Villafagne will illuminate the sounds of Kasper T. Toeplitz - composer associated with Art Zoyd Studios - with raw humanity, textual matter and imposing images of ghostly monuments, still very much present, from this rich past.

And what about the Elephant?

He's the one who knows,

He's the one who took the wrong path

He is the reporter of our collective memory.

He's the one who'll speak up in spite of everything, like the artist who can't be silenced.

Monique Hourbette-Vialadieu, May 2025