“Whirlwindsong” at the Château des Adhémar : orchestrating the sensory

Gunther Ludwig

 

Title of a series of artworks, and title of the exhibition at the Art Centre of the Château des Adhémar, Whirlwindsong evokes the territories surveyed by Cécile Le Talec: sound, music, language, and space. Convoked as natural and constructed events, they contribute to interactions developed between people and their environment, which the artist explores through multiple forms and geographies.

 

Cécile Le Talec works with the plasticity of sound, an auditory sensation produced by an acoustic wave that travels and vibrates through the air or in matter. She observes its propagation, the fashioning of its own space, the transport of signs and languages emitted by minerals, plants, animals, liquids and gases…

 

The exhibition underlines the musical dimension of her work, with the Whirlwindsong ensemble, among others. Among the specifically created pieces, it lies at the heart of the work. Independent and yet connected, in the room on the first floor of the Château for which they had been devised, these artworks form the cohesive logic of the exhibition. A film-score, produced from a whirlpool at sea in Naruto, Japan, airs the sounds of the natural phenomenon. It plays opposite Groundsong, an installation consisting of a singing wooden floor and a shifting landscape created by using the technique of suminagashi inks. Inspired by the ‘nightingale parquet floor’ of the Nijo Palace in Kyoto, sounds from multiple sources are triggered by the footsteps of spectators and intermingle with the layered sounds of the whirlpool. Finally, a long version of the film gives rise to the composition of an electroacoustic work by Haruyuki Suzuki, which will be performed during a concert-performance. As a whole, the works invite a perception of a synaesthetic nature, in which touch, sight and hearing are associated, and sensations and information are layered together.

 

This plastic interdependency has something to do with the myth of the tower of Babel, not only concerning the incommunicability of the languages. It also maintains ties with the idea of place anchored like an emblem of assembly, of space traversed from the foundation of the tower in the earth, through to its summit, in the sky. The work is situated between the production of signs of assembly and an attempted explanation of the unlimited, the incomprehensible. The artworks are part and parcel with this oscillation, between the measurement of the elements and actions over/with/based on them. Out of the myth, an attempt to explain human weakness and dispersion emerges, in another idea beloved of the artist: the utopia of a transcription of elements – birdsong, music from trees, sounds from the stars or the earth, languages – which do not communicate directly. It is an extravagant enterprise with considerable poetic leverage, such as the woven correspondence presented in Panoramique Polyphonique in the loggia. This is because Cécile Le Talec remains fascinated by this state of incomprehension and improbable dialogue. She strives to make these agreements through systems of equivalency that spatialise them and provide them with a material and artistic form.

 

These attempts go hand in hand with the notions of experimentation or laboratory that she affirms. She is not a musician, or a linguist, ethnologist or sound engineer for that matter – she nonetheless touches on all of these domains. She imagines systems, objects that mentally refer to a potential porosity. In the exhibition, Di.se (archet magnétique), Prosodie, Pupitre, Phylactère or Serinette are the ‘tools’ intended to enable the reading or the playing of a ‘score’ that is written, spoken, sung through the science of codes, printed maps, mechanisms, etc. All the machines are fictive, since, beyond the reality of the analogies, their activation remains uncertain, arduous, or even dangerous. Hence the series ‘The Impure’, a collection of glass percussion instruments brought together in the chapel of the Château. Using them involves a double risk of failure: not knowing how to play them or breaking them…

 

Despite the instability of the hypotheses, Cécile Le Talec seeks the echo of the immaterial and fleeting dimension of her explorations into matter. The Pavillons Naruto, sound sculptures that borrow their design from phonographs, made out of pottery, broadcast a sound composition

based on the sounds of the wind recorded around the Château. Just like Stanza, this work poetically explores the ‘lightness’ of the sound and the tangibility of the substance that it traverses. This state of in between reaches a kind of paroxysm in Plastersong, videos projected in the chapel of the Château. On vertical screens, two male ‘statues’ gradually liberate themselves from their gangue in order to reappropriate movement, the ability to cause sounds to travel, the possibility of communication. Two mirrored artworks, like a symbol of chimera – the kinds of sensorial journeys that Cécile Le Talec endeavours to orchestrate.