Audio-visual installation, Projection, 4.1 surround sound and stereo open headphones
- Experimental -

Dear Phonocene takes root in the industrial forests around my home (Rhône). Inspired by recent scientific studies on acoustic enrichment showing that sound diffusion in damaged environments can help their restoration, I wanted to explore the speculative gesture by inviting field recordists to listen and playback recordings in forest plantations and clear-cut areas. The sounds we are playing were recorded on site over several years, collected in bits of forest that have since been cut down or in unlogged areas. Here, without scientific pretension but as a poetic fiction of acoustic care, our sounds represent a certain reactivation of a past soundscape. Like a distant memory of extinct species, could these sounds perhaps have a positive impact on these places? How to listen to this post-natural landscape? Part performance film, part slow-moving sound fiction, Dear Phonocene offers a way to care for the living through listening. The term "phonocene" is directly borrowed from Donna Haraway, and taken up by Vinciane Despret to propose a philosophical concept of an era where the sonic is as important as carbon, and where attention is paid to the sounds of the earth. How do we listen to these remaining voices? What do we take in when we take in sound? The Dear Phonocene installation documents this research.

Vimeo link (PW on demand) here.