The sound installation Kokin (...) Slendro concentrates the major themes running through Julien Grossmann's early work, which is nourished by ethnomusicology and the relationship between music, power and identity. The work, composed of six revolving sound dioramas, invites us to travel the world through six musical scales, each represented by a small island placed in the center of a vinyl record. The six discs feature each a different musical composition by the artist, played on a synthesizer each using a selected musical scale and the timbre of traditional instruments. Playing with our perceptions and common imaginaries, the artist uses music as a geographical marker, without detailing any real concordance between the island landscape and the music that accompanies it. Through the “exotic” sounds and visuals of the diorama, Julien Grossmann explores our relationship with the imaginary of distant lands, itself colonized by colonial heritage.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that this French artist lives in the Netherlands, where the term ethnomusicology was coined, a discipline often associated with the study and collection of non-Western music and oral traditions. One of the distinctive features of ethnomusicology is the practice of field recording, collecting music and songs in the context of their production. Almost cynically, the recording technologies – wax cylinder, disc and magnetic tape – which have enabled this work, have also accentuated the Western cultural hegemony linked to industrialized distribution systems in all parts of the world. Thus, large-scale endeavors to safeguard oral traditions in areas linked to colonial history are also often the harbingers of their disappearance.

These ethnomusicological recordings and the abundant record collections dedicated to "world music" have contributed to the creation of this exotic, fixed, Western-centric imaginary. The small, confined islands in the installation are a reminder of this quest for the preservation and of the museification of world music. The island itself is historically represented as a place of mystery, or often as a kind of Utopia, an earthly paradise that has remained untouched by the vicissitudes of the world. Grossmann's islands always return to their point of origin, revolving without moving. Lost in the middle of a black ocean with a frozen wave, they reflect upon an original, unaltered state that would never end – an isolation synonymous with an authenticity often claimed by ethnomusicology.

This regime of authenticity and truthfulness seems to reflect the result of commercial and imperialist policies that have gradually supplanted local cultures, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. However, in reaction to this, and as a reaffirmation of a local or national political and cultural identity, certain African states such as Mali, with the Orchestre National A, have implemented policies to encourage the creation or recreation of a national musical identity, thus marking the hiatus between music collected by Western scholars and cultural reality. This preservation also obscures the phenomena of crossbreeding, partly linked to the diasporas of colonialism, made up of migrants and conquerors who conveyed, took away and brought back music from home and abroad.

Beneath the harmless, playful appearance of a rotating diorama, Julien Grossmann's work also questions the cloistering of cultural exchanges, the temptations of identitarian and nationalist withdrawal, and supports the idea that music, and perhaps even more so popular music, is a cultural asset that is constructed in a complex tangle of traditions, innovations and exchanges. Using the metaphor of the island, the artist reminds us that one of the earliest attested meanings of the verb to isolate is "to make in the form of an island", but that music and culture have the capacity to turn these enclosed spaces into archipelagos.