Since 2005, the museum has encouraged ‘sound sculptors’ to populate its spaces, including during the successive Night of Museums (Luc Martinez, Knud Viktor, Hanna Hartman, Gilles Aubry, Goetze Naleppa, students of the Chair of Experimental Radio, Bauhaus-University Weimar led by Nathalie Singer, etc.) The collection is closely linked to these events and the artists featured. A guiding principle was established in which the landscape and the materiality of sound, both physically and emotionally, prevail.
Hanna Hartman, who exhibited her piece Longitude 013°26' at the Night of Museums 2007, Vents Dominants, was commissioned in 2010 by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the Centre national des arts plastiques to produce Acoustic Catacombs, an installation with sound flooring, the sound materials of which were collected mainly in Arles.
Maxie Götze and Anja Erdmann, then students at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, produced for the Night of Museums 2010, Sons à tous les étages, the art work Luftikus – an installation with moving fans, acquired the following year, directly inspired by the mischievous Mistral and the light, key atmospheric constituents of the landscape in Arles.
Gilles Aubry, invited for Night of Museums 2011 devised a series of installations in situ called Flux donnés à entendre. On this occasion, two out of the ten stages in this sound journey joined the collections: Rotors, 2011 and Compagnie sucrière, 2011.
The life of a radio broadcast is usually of short duration. After only a few transmissions valuable acoustic treasures disappear without trace into the archives of the broadcasting centres. Hardly any of the public broadcasters also provide public access to their productions. This is particularly regrettable when it involves original radio art. It is precisely this which brings out the exceptional expressiveness of the medium.
In order to avoid this impasse, the sound art editor Götz Naleppa, upon his retirement from Deutschlandradio Kultur, handed over the existing productions to the Phonurgia Nova association and the Musée Réattu Arles.
sonosphere sees itself as a resonance space for innovative artistic work with sound. sonosphere is an online museum that will continue to grow with future productions by Deutschlandradio Kultur, keeping its doors open for further collections.
