This work, commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain & Le Chœur de l'Orchestre de Paris by Cité de la Musique and Philharmonie de Paris to accompany the film 'L'Étoile de mer' by Man Ray for the 50th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou, sets four texts by French surrealist poets: 'Rien qu’une étoile' and 'La nuit pleure tout haut,' by Céline Arnauld, and 'L'Étoile de mer' and 'J'ai tant rêvé de toi' by Robert Desnos.

Man Ray’s 1928 surrealist short film L'Étoile de mer is a dreamlike, hazy visual poem about a man who meets a woman, brings her to a room, and becomes fixated on a preserved starfish in a glass tube instead of her. The four poems (one of which, Desnos's L'Étoile de mer,' provided the film's inspiration) give voice to the man and woman, offering contrasting perspectives on the nature of romantic desire, idealization, and objectification. Céline Arnauld was one of the few prominent women deeply embedded in the original Paris Dada movement alongside her contemporaries. Reading her later work as a foil to L'Étoile de mer exposes the tension of that era: male avant-gardists were using film to deconstruct and idolize the female form, while female avant-gardists were using poetry to reclaim their own interior voices from the chaos.