Listening room
Sound art Department
The Listening Room explores the ins and outs of acoustic creation. Félix Blume and Dominique Petitgand take over this acoustic igloo throughout 2021. The Musée Réattu's partners in the Sound Art Department: Phonurgia Nova and the CNAP selected these two artists.
Félix Blume (France, 1984) from 18th May to 30th October 2021
A sound artist and sound engineer, he currently lives between Mexico, Brazil and France. He shapes sound like a material to create his sound pieces, videos, actions or installations. His work, centred on listening, invites us to transform our perception of the environment. He uses public space as a place for experimentation as well as a place to present his projects, often in collaboration with groups of people. He is interested in myths and contemporary interpretations of them, in dialogue between humans and the context - natural or urban - they inhabit, in what voices tell us, beyond words.
Dominique Petitgand (France, 1965) from 1st November 2021 to 30th April 2022
Since 1992, Dominique Petitgand has been composing and producing sound pieces in which voices, noises, musical atmospheres and silences construct, through editing, micro-universes in which ambiguity constantly subsists between a principle of reality (recording of people talking about themselves) and a projection into a dreamlike, out-of-context and timeless fiction.
He defines his works as "narratives and mental landscapes". In an almost obsessive way, he inventories voices, gestures and moods, to take note of a word, a state or a lack. Through his sound pieces, he implicitly proposes a story, in the making, which belongs only to the listener.
Félix Blume, Horses Talks: Dii, Hai, O and other words of horses, 2018
18th – 30th May
Horses Talk, Dii, Hai, O and other horse words, 7’19”, 2018. Production: Semi Silent
In the small village of Benești, a few hours’ drive west of Bucharest, locals use horse-drawn carts to go to the fields. Coachmen talk to their horses to indicate which directions to follow and the appropriate speed. Voices speak beyond words, inviting us to listen to timbre, rhythms and melodies that intertwine as they are spoken.
31st May – 27th June
Los Gritos de México, 29’, 2015
In Mexico City people shout to be heard, to feel united, and when they demonstrate they shout too. People shout in church, pray together or pray alone, whispering in the silence of the night. The thunder rumbles: no one can shout against the storm, and the rain cleans the city, silently. We sing to forget, we shout again, louder than the others, so as not to be forgotten. The daily soundscape is often a continuous layer of sound from near and distant traffic. Mexico City adds to this layer a whole series of sounds that make the city's sound specific: the shouts and sounds of the street vendors feature prominently.
The work is accompanied by the piece Coro Informal, an interactive sound installation comprising ten wooden boxes, each containing the cry and illustration of a street vendor. The recordings were made in the historic centre of Mexico City, in collaboration with the vendors of Moneda Street. The illustrations, presented in postcard format, were inspired by a series of Parisian postcards from 1901.
Project by Daniel Godínez Nivón and Félix Blume
28th June – 1st August
Curupira, bête des bois, Video and sound, 35’, 2018
In the heart of the Amazon, the inhabitants of Tauary invite us to listen to the sounds of their forest, with its birds and animals. However, several strange sounds emerge: a creature is lurking among the trees. Of those who have heard it, very few have seen it, and those who have met it have never returned. It charms, it enchants, it drives people mad, it takes them away, it causes people to become lost: everyone tells it in their own way and tries to decipher its calls. Curupira, bête des bois takes us on a search for this being: a reflection on myths and their place in the contemporary world, a sound thriller in the middle of the jungle.
2nd August – 29th August
Sapo, 9 canaux, 60’, 2018. Production Tsonami co-directed with Claudio Rojo
Sapo (toad in Spanish) is the person who tells the drivers the time interval between two buses on the same line so that they keep their distance and optimise the number of passengers on board. In Valparaíso, it is a typical street character, always accompanied by his notebook to make his calculations. His cry is a reference, the sound mark of a place. The installation, both visual and sound, is based on the notebooks of nine of them and makes the sound of their cries heard. Later, the voices of several of the city's inhabitants were added, introducing an imaginary flow of passengers. The installation endeavours to reveal the poetics of ephemeral information that loses its value in a few minutes.
30th August – 26th September
Mutt Dogs, street dogs recorded in binaural, 5’09’’, 2017. Arte Radio production, co-directed with Sara Lana.
Known as "vira-latas" (bin-turners), street dogs offer us an insight into their canine world and their cohabitation with humans. When you're a dog, you like to rummage through the rubbish to find something to eat, you bark when a motorbike goes by, you run around the cars that invade your territory, you sneak inside houses and explore abandoned land. A ground-level soundwalk, recorded in binaural by dogs in a recently urbanised neighbourhood on the edge of Belo Horizonte, in south-east Brazil.
27th September – 30th October
Fuga, 6’49’’, 2016. Production Phaune Radio.
Lecheria is a district in the north of Mexico City. Freight trains from the south of the country arrive there, those from the north leave. It is an obligatory passage for migrants who use the trains to reach the United States. More than a place of passage, it is a place of travel. Travel as a way of life, without destination and departure. Along the tracks, we imagine the future, we invent a past. The train passes by, bringing hope. We run alongside it and with one jump we embark. As a travelling companion, it becomes bestial, it calls us, roaring and threatening, it feeds on human flesh...The outward journey becomes a return journey, the traveller becomes immobile. The names of the places travelled and dreamed of resonate.
