Le son de l’art

A sound walk based on recordings of art galleries and museums, 2011 onwards

Artist Statement

Walked, voiced, displaced.

You are given a sound player and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Upon pressing play, the sound walk starts. You are invited to walk. You may stop for a while, walk again, stroll, or wander around while listening to a collection of recordings in galleries and museums in which voices, steps, artworks or their description, comments, unrelated stories, or simply the space as a whole can be heard. The format of these recordings is either in normal stereo, or binaural format, allowing for more accurate first-person reproduction of sound.

Le Son de l’Art is a collection of field recordings made during exhibitions in art galleries and museums. This ongoing archival series collects the sounds of artworks or their machinery, footsteps, and voices. They present the sonic experiences of the places and highlight particular ways to move, walk, talk, and even breathe in them.

The series develops a personal history of art through sound; yet it is more than a document, as it opens up a space for listening that is focused on its potential for narration and its internal drama that can crystallize around voices, silences or any other sound events. The recordings are mostly done without planning and their variety creates a singular archive in which different focuses might appear.

Le Son de l’Art, begins with simple instructions, and functions as an unguided audio guide. The sound walk creates an ambiguous and complex sense of space; it is an out-of-sync experience of audio-vision where the acoustical space of the recording is transposed onto the actual one the listener is in. Slipping between different temporal, spatial, and informational settings of art, the listener finds himself in a rediscovered intimate situation through a possible withdrawal into oneself. With the environment suspended, he is lost in an in-between elsewhere.