La tête la première
sound installation with 10 speakers
2009

solo exhibition La tête la première, FRAC Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, 2009

 

Les heures creuses 

The installation called La tête la première is a composite work and takes up a whole building, almost all in one piece: the upper floor is used as a gangway and the openings are not a limit to the emitting of the sounds. The voices find refuge in a small room on the ground floor which is plunged in darkness and on the gangway upstairs: speakers at ear level. The other sounds (screams – songs, puffs, whistling, frequency, beats, impacts, suspended chorus) are laid out as if they were produced by the architecture itself: on the ground, up high on the beams (vault under the roof), under the stairs or behind a wall.
The installation divides out a range of sound elements from a whole to be pieced again together. It has no centre, does not use all the speakers at the same time, plays with the distances, connects what is close with what is distant. It is made up of several sound pieces and silences, connecting together some of the different parts, in a way that is peculiar to each sequence. Sometimes a sound, or a musical element, from one end of the building to the other, accompanies a voice. Other times, it amplifies it, manipulates it or relativizes it

excerpt

extrait

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photos Marc Domage


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–  text by Rahma Khazam, press article Flash Art International, Milan may 2009, En.

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