Large scale video projection.

On 16th August 1936 Francis Poulenc travelled from a hotel in Uzerche to visit La Chappelle Notre Dame in Rocamadour. This journey culminated in an encounter with the black Madonna housed there. This visit was to change his life forever.

In the summer of 2006 I retraced the same journey that Poulenc made seventy years ago. This was part of a longer journey from Bristol to Gstaad to Venice to Paris to Toulouse and home. During the whole trip I kept a diary.

What results is a 23 minute journey from hotel to Chapel where the minds and actions of composer and artist become intermingled. A French voiceover guides us to reflect on this particular pilgrimage as an allusion to almost any journey we have experienced.

I recorded a physical journey in the present that has a destination tangibly rooted historically and geographically, but whose ultimate goal is (and was, in Poulenc’s terms, although he didn’t realise it at the time) the less palpable prize of inspiration.