Serre Numérique Inauguration

A live video-mapped performance that rebuilds the history of Valenciennes through shifting projection, sound, and modular stage architecture.

Video-mapped imagery spreads across a wall of illuminated boxes while the audience watches in silhouette.
Performance at the opening of Serre Numérique, Valenciennes, 2015. Photo: Samuel Dhote.

Serre Numérique Inauguration is a live video-mapped performance created for the opening of Serre Numérique in Valenciennes. Projected across a shifting structure of illuminated boxes, the work follows the city’s history from early settlement and industrial growth to its reinvention as a centre for digital education and production. As May repositions the boxes throughout the piece, the stage is repeatedly assembled, broken apart, and rebuilt, turning civic history into a changing architectural image.

The work combines moving image, choreography, sound, and custom software to show memory as something actively constructed rather than simply preserved. References to Valenciennes, including the red cordon associated with protection and renewal, connect local history to wider questions of resilience, loss, and transformation. This project reflects May’s wider interest in how technological systems shape what is recorded and retained, and how images can hold together fact, reconstruction, and belief.

Additional notes

  • Commissioned and supported by Décalab for the opening of Serre Numérique, Valenciennes, France.
  • Duration: 15 minutes.
  • Live video mapping was projected onto movable box structures repositioned by the artist during the performance.
  • Video mapping was created with Painting With Light and synchronised to the soundtrack and DMX lighting with an early version of Fugio.
  • The soundtrack was created and recorded by Alex May using sounds recorded in Valenciennes.
  • May revisited the project in 2020 to create a digital recreation of the original performance.
  • Performance photographs by Samuel Dhote.

Selected images

Alex May moves a stack of boxes beside a projected wall of bold circular patterns.
A reconfigured stage sequence from the live performance. Photo: Samuel Dhote.
Projection mapping spans a wide wall of illuminated boxes beneath overhead rigging while the audience watches.
The performance builds and rebuilds the stage as the work unfolds. Photo: Samuel Dhote.
Audience silhouettes face a projection-mapped wall of boxes carrying graphic forms and city imagery.
Performance at the opening of Serre Numérique. Photo: Samuel Dhote.