Just listening

A symposium organised by the Bachelor in Sound Arts

General themes

  • The relationship between sound and visual dimensions
  • Sound as a transversal (interdisciplinary) paradigm
  • Sound and environmental issues



The symposium, organised by the Bachelor in Sound Arts at EDHEA, will bring together artists and researchers to discuss and reflect upon the role of sound in art and other artistic and scientific disciplines. At the crossroads of visual and sound arts, the Bachelor promotes the study and practice of original artistic forms based on the medium of sound or on a certain idea of listening, treating them as paradigmatic of current approaches to artistic creation. To this aim, it links students, researchers, artists and creators active in a variety of artistic, scientific or technical fields who believe in the self-evidence of this approach.

During two days, by sharing these different ideas, we aim to challenge both our “listening” faculty and our usual way of grasping and perceiving our environments. The public will be invited to attend conferences and performances and will have the opportunity to discover artworks in which sound plays an essential role.


Friday, October 1st
Theme : sound and visual dimensions

Welcome at the TLH from 11:30 (sanitary control)
13:15 – 13:30 Welcome speech
13:30 – 14:00 Lecture by Latifa Echakhch and Alexandre Babel (FR-CH)
14:15 – 14:45 Performed lecture by Eva Frapiccini (IT)
15:00 – 15:30 Lecture by Maxime Guitton (FR)
Pause
16:00 – 16:30 Lecture by Vincent Rioux (FR)
16:45 – 17:15 Performed lecture by Christophe Fellay (CH)
17:30 – 18:30 Round table with Latifa Echakhch, Maxime Guitton, Vincent Rioux. Moderator: Nancy Ypsilantis
19:00 – 21:00 Aperitif and dinner
21:00 Chaises Musicales, performance by Eric Hattan and Julian Sartorius
22:00 – 24:00 The artists' installations can be discovered until midnight.



Saturday, October 2nd
Theme of the morning: Sound as a transversal paradigm

Welcome at the TLH from 8h00 (sanitary control)
9:15 – 9:30 Welcome speech
9:30 – 10:00 Lecture by Salomé Voegelin (GB-CH)
10:15 – 10:45 Lecture by François J. Bonnet (FR)
Pause
11:15 – 11:45 Performed lecture by Marcelline Delbecq (FR)
12:00 – 12:30 Lecture by Didier Grandjean and Julie Semoroz (CH)
Lunch break

Themes of the afternoon: Sound and ecology – Listening and context

14:30 – 15:00 Videoconference by Philip Samartzis (AU)
15:15 – 15:45 Performed lecture by Nadine Schütz (CH-FR)
16:00 – 16:30 Videoconference by Bill Fontana (USA)
Pause
17:00 – 18:00 Round table with François J. Bonnet, Marcelline Delbecq, Salomé Voegelin. Moderator: Nancy Ypsilantis
18:15 – 18:30 Performance by Diana Martin (CH)
18:30 – 20:30 Aperitif and dinner
20:30 Of about Alvin Curran, Eric Baudelaire, 2020, 75’01’’
22:00 – 24:00 The artists' installations can be discovered until midnight.



These installations are present during the two days
Sound environments: RTS listening laboratory (foyer)
Eva Frapiccini, Dreams'Time Capsule, 2011 (foyer)
Claire Frachebourg, Mouvements 1 - 2 - 3, 2020 (Le Labo)
Léa Locher & Noémie Tagan, Ritour nella douza 1 - 2, 2020 (lab)
Philippe Samartzis, Sound and Ecology - Listening and Context, 2021 (small room)


The guests

The Just listening symposium will include conferences, round tables and performances. The programme and guest list will be regularly updated on the websites of TLH-Sierre and EDHEA. The current guest list includes:

Eric Baudelaire (FR), artist and filmmaker, laureate of the 2019 Marcel Duchamp prize. Projection of his recent film Of About Alvin Curran, about the American composer and sound artist.

François J. Bonnet (FR-CH),   composer and theoretician (author of  Les mots et les sons, l'Eclat, 2012;  L'Infra-Monde, MF, 2015; Après la mort, L'Eclat, 2017; and La musique à venir, Shelter Press, 2020), director of the Musical Research Group at the French National Audiovisual Institute and radio producer at France Musique. 

Marcelline Delbecq (FR), artist and author of poetic essays in the form of fragments. In her sound installations and public readings, the voice conjures up a narrative universe where the words are put into sound to create images between reality and abstraction.

Latifa Echakhch (MA-CH), artist and guest lecturer at EDHEA, and Alexandre Babel (CH-DE), percussionist and director of the Genevan group Eklekto, will give us insights into their collaboration in view of Echakhch's upcoming representation of Switzerland at the Venice Art Biennale in 2022.

Christophe Fellay (CH), sound artist, musician, composer, performer and improviser. His artistic interests include indisciplinarity, listening, acoustics, sound architectures and environmental issues. He is particularly interested in the interactions between gestures, movement and sound. He is in charge of the Bachelor in Sound Arts at EDHEA.

Bill Fontana (USA), American composer and artist, owes his international reputation to his pioneering experiences in the field of sound. Since his first works in the 1970s, he has been using sound as a sculptural medium to interact with our perception of visual and architectural spaces and to transform them.

Eva Frapiccini (IT), artist, is interested in different forms of language and in invisible modes of expression. After teaching a workshop at EDHEA she will present her Dreams’Time Capsule.

Didier Grandjean (CH), professor at the University of Geneva, and Julie Semoroz (CH), sound artist based in Geneva, will showcase their reflections, collaborations, research and installations/workshops to the general public presented at Halle Nord, the Comédie de Genève and the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2021. 

Maxime Guitton (FR), research coordinator and artistic and cultural programmer at the Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, assistant of Eliane Radigue from 2009 to 2011. He has been conducting a research on the archives of the composer Alvin Curran since 2017.

Eric Hattan (CH), artist, & Julian Sartorius (CH), percussionist, will perform Les chaises musicales, created during a residency at the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris in 2014.

Diana Martin (CH), graduated from the EDHEA Bachelor programme in 2021. On the occasion of the symposium she will present a sound performance.

Vincent Rioux (FR), is in charge of the "Supersonic" Chair at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, created in collaboration with IRCAM in 2020.

Philip Samartzis (AU), sound artist, researcher and curator, associate professor of the Bachelor of Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 2021, he was invited by the Verbier 3-D Foundation.

Nadine Schütz (CH-FR), composer and sound artist, has a doctorate in landscape acoustics. She explores the sound dimension of space through creations, sound installations and works on acoustic environments that connect urban and human, musical and natural dimensions.

Salomé Voegelin (GB-CH), artist and writer, reader in sound art at the London College of Communication, London University of the Arts and Braunschweig University of Fine Arts.


Round table discussions

October 1, 2021 round table discussions
With Latifa Echakhch, Maxime Guitton, Vincent Rioux. Moderating: Nancy Ypsilantis.

October 2, 2021 round table discussions
With avec François J. Bonnet, Marcelline Delbecq, Salomé Voegelin. Moderating: Nancy Ypsilantis


Project partners

Loterie romande


OIKEN


Radio Télévision Suisse - RTS


TLH-Sierre


Practical information

Friday 1 and Saturday 2 October 2021 at TLH-Sierre.
The symposium is open to everyone. The entrance is free except for the performance Chaises musicales (CHF 20.-).
Registration form can be found above on this page.