Oliver Beer – Resonance Project: The Cave

Filmed in one of the best-preserved prehistoric caves in southwestern France—home to some of the world’s earliest known artworks—The Cave brings together eight singers from across the globe, each invited by Oliver Beer to perform fragments of a song connected to their earliest musical memory. Reflecting a wide range of cultural and geographic origins, the work features American-Canadian singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, French artist Woodkid, Canadian-Haitian musician Mélissa Laveaux, alongside singers from Japan, Denmark, Lebanon and Australia.

Granted rare access to this archaeologically significant site, Beer discovered that the cave’s ancient paintings had been placed in areas of heightened acoustic resonance. Each singer performs in tune with the cave’s natural harmonics, their voices naturally amplified by the cave and weaving together in the gallery space into a haunting polyphony—meticulously recomposed by Beer into a resonant tapestry of lullabies, folk songs, and ancestral melodies.

Oliver Beer’s practice fuses music with visual art. Since 2007, he has been developing his Resonance Project—a series of works exploring the relationship between voice, architecture, and inherited memory. Previous iterations have taken place in sites including the Ottoman baths of Istanbul and the emblematic glass-clad tubular walkways of the Centre Pompidou. The Cave marks a major evolution in the series.