Les cordes vocales
sound installation for a sound system
2024

exhibition Une clameur, Fort L’Écluse, Pays de Gex, 2024 (cur. ateliers bermuda: Max Bondu, Bénédicte Le Pimpec, Guillaume Robert)
first version: exhibition Art en chapelles, church of Métabief, 2016

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The sound piece serves as a guard of honor accompanying everyone on their way to the Fort.

Located on the slope leading to the drawbridge and the entrance gate, the installation makes use of the existing sound system—usually used for sound-and-light shows—and plays on the disparity created by the sheer scale of the sound system and the intimate proximity of the recordings being played.
6 speakers and 4 subwoofers—large and positioned on either side of the path—play a long series of spoken and musical segments on a loop.

Les cordes vocales bring together a collective of voices—of different ages and genders—with brief, restrained, and then slightly expanded phrases; mini-stories sometimes emerge, carried by a few musical elements. The voices form a threshold, a vestibule; they welcome us, and then we set off with them as we leave the Fort.

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Fort L’Écluse, Pays de Gex, 2024 – photos 1 D.P. / 2 Guillaume Robert

first version, with voices only

Inside the church, the sound piece is played through the venue’s sound system via 4 speakers mounted high on the walls and facing the pews.
A long, dotted sound suggests a series of spoken words interspersed with silences, in a succession of short sequences, implicit stories, soliloquies, mock dialogues, and exhalations that lie somewhere between a cry and a song, unfolding various states of the voice and the narrative. Several voices, interwoven with one another, evoke in turn a sense of rhythm, a few instructions, sleep, an obstacle, a hesitation, a daydream, a transformation, and a departure.
The fragmented form of the work—which can be perceived as a series of miniatures as well as a long, polyphonic phrase with no beginning or end—gives us the freedom to stay and listen for as long as we like.

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church of Métabief, 2016 – photos D.P.

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