sound installations for a garden

Behind the landscape we see lies a landscape we hear and imagine: a possible projection into a poetic fiction brought to life
by sound.

For this outdoor sound installation, scattered throughout the botanical garden along a self-guided path, five listening points
are situated at select vantage points. Visitors strolling through
the garden are invited to pause and take a step back from their walk, to sit down near a speaker, for a moment of their own, whether to listen casually or intently.

Each speaker, mounted on a micro-architecture, plays a composition created specifically for each location: five long, fragmented, and open-ended narratives featuring multiple voices from different generations, a few words, a few sounds, musical elements, and silences. These sound elements do not originate from the garden itself but are superimposed upon it, drawn from other sources, from another time or from afar. These broadcast sequences suggest an alternative, invented, ethereal landscape, offering a mental geography and a reverie unique to each interpretation—one that may resonate with, engage in dialogue with, or contrast against the landscape before our eyes, like an imaginary duplicate of the existing landscape.

Set within or facing the landscape, the sound installation—divided into five listening points—is site-specific (tailored to each location), intimate, modest in scale, freely accessible, with no fixed duration, and environmentally friendly (the technical equipment is solar-powered).

Some of the voices—featured in the project with Les Blés d’Or
in 2022: Ginette Ejarque, Geneviève Gandy, Odette Chazot,
Clarisse Bouvret, Raymond Brachet, Andrée Perrin and Charles Second—were recorded in collaboration with Charlotte Imbault.