there is no band / non c’é nessuna orchestra
a solo exhibition supported by
Recontemporary Foundation and Great Meadows Foundation
Recontemporary, Turin, Italy
2026
there is no band / non c’é nessuna orchestra
4K 3D animation, digitized 16mm film, audio, fog
00:04:58 loop
2026
Inspired by Carbonneau’s family history of labor, aspirations of wealth, the struggle for upward mobility, this work examines how consumer film cameras were used to document and perform ideals associated with the American Dream. Combining digitally constructed fog with 16mm home movies depicting cars, driving, and destinations, discovered in her grandmother’s apartment after her death, this work examines how the past can haunt the present, how ideas of success and the American Dream often exist in tension with lived reality, and how moving images simultaneously represent and distort reality.
The audio is drawn from the opening car crash scene of the David Lynch film, Mulholland Drive, stretched from approximately one minute to roughly five minutes, until the original source becomes distorted and unrecognizable. Just as the film’s protagonist succumbs to the pressures of ambition and fractured identity, the slowed and distorted soundscape evokes the instability that marked the troubled life and death of Carbonneau’s brother, whose struggles with addiction and eventual death in an automobile accident came to embody the fragile and often elusive pursuit of success.
The title of this work refers to the iconic scene in Mulholland Drive in which the host of Club Silencio walks onto the stage and declares, “No hay banda!”—Spanish for “There is no band!” This moment marks a pivotal rupture in the film where illusion begins to collapse. As the emcee repeatedly insists that there is no band, even while music continues to play, the scene exposes the artificial construction behind performance, cinema, memory, and identity, forcing both the characters and audience to confront the instability of what they have accepted as real. The title of Carbonneau’s work is presented in both English and Italian, reflecting the place where the artist lives and the place where the work was created.
