The sound of voices hitting stone and hitting back the ear. A mystical place, made through sound.
Echos de la pierre is an experiment in three iterations. Two installations. One recording.
The first installation took place in Eichstätt, Germany, in June 2019. The second one, in Gravelines, France, in September 2019. The first installation was in a basement of my home university. The second one, in a 16th century church.
The recording is an artificial remaking of the room. An artificial rebuilding of the church. A church that never was1.
The resonant qualities of a room are the manifestation of Echo, not only as the acoustic phenomenon2, but as active co-prehension, co-constitution of the situation. Through sound and resonance, there is an individuation, a becoming. A composition expanding beyond the canonical definition of beauty, but still taking into account the “tuning” of the place. There is a movement of sound, in sound, with sound, that presents the liveliness of the place, its hospitality, and the playfulness of Echo talking back. Not speaking first is not a curse, but creation, a generative practice. A mode of knowledge production that renders the original impact, but adding value to it. Knowledge not as explanation, but as addition to reality, as multiplication of versions (Despret, 2019; Despret & Galetic, 2007) .
Echo knows because she repeats. Repetition as difference. Difference as impact, as knowledge production. Thinking-with Echo is thinking-with sound. It is thinking-with space. The spatiality of sound, absorbed or reflected. The (re-)de-finition of a territory. Fields of intensities, multiplicities.
Resonance as difference, as becoming with, as knowledge production.
Word and meaning disappearing. From text, to sound, to bodies, to space.
The activation of space. From a filled container to a territory of expressive qualities, a multiplicity of intensities, a gathering of impacts.
The reverberation modelisation, although based on actual measurements in the church, can never really recreate the event. ↩︎
The difference between echo and reverberation is mostly spatial. The human ear apparently can only perceive sounds as discrete events if there are at least 1/15 of second apart, which means that the reflecting surface must be at least 17 meters away from the sound source. ↩︎