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Introduction

Introduction: Exploring the Artistic Uses of Sonic Remnants

Introduction : Penser les usages artistiques des traces sonores
Christine Esclapez et Luis Velasco-Pufleau
Cet article est une traduction de :
Introduction : Penser les usages artistiques des traces sonores [fr]

Résumés

Les archives sont aussi bien des lieux de pouvoir que des lieux de mémoire. De ce fait, les pratiques artistiques qui explorent des archives sonores ont la capacité de transformer de façon sensible nos visions du passé et de produire de nouveaux savoirs. Les articles de ce numéro de Filigrane interrogent le potentiel créateur des archives sonores. Comment, à partir des archives sonores, les artistes proposent-ils ou elles des récits contre-hégémoniques de l’histoire ? Quels sont les processus de création mis en œuvre dans la réutilisation de ces archives ? Comment les artistes et leurs œuvres réactivent-ils par l’écoute les voix du passé, proposent-ils de nouveaux récits, explorent-ils les dits et non-dits de la mémoire collective et de l’histoire officielle, et font-ils résonner les luttes du passé pour comprendre celles du présent ?

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Notes de l’auteur

The research underpinning this special issue was financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101027828 (project ONTOMUSIC), and the Unité mixte de recherche PRISM (UMR 7061).

Texte intégral

Listening to sonic remnants

  • 1 Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989); Michel Foucault, L’archéologi (...)
  • 2 Aline Caillet and Frédéric Pouillaude, eds., Un art documentaire: enjeux esthétiques, politiques et (...)

1A growing interest in the issue of archives from an institutional as well as an epistemological and ethical point of view has gradually emerged since the late twentieth century.1 The ‘documental turn’ or ‘documentary turn’ has highlighted the need to reflect on new ways of exploring archives and cultural data (especially relating to artistic use) and on the dynamics of circulation, accumulation and extraction underlying their creation.2 While the conservation of archives often entails a diminishing usefulness, their artistic and civic use can launch a new phase of their existence, open the way for acquiring new knowledge, and enable the rethinking of common heritage as well as the way in which we create our history.

  • 3 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995).
  • 4 Dietmar Schenk, “Pouvoir de l’archive et vérité historique,” trans. Philippe Forget, Écrire l’histo (...)
  • 5 Schenk.

2Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, archives as reminders, clues, evidence and testimonials have become ‘objects’ to be re-examined. They are at once the locus of institutions and power, but also of memory, which must be continuously reactivated. Following on from Michel Foucault’s work on historiography, Jacques Derrida underlines the profound ambivalence of the archive that takes us back (sometimes unwillingly) to our darkest pasts.3 Derrida’s ‘postmodern’ turn in archival studies extends this debate, endowing archives with semantic and metaphorical ‘power’.4 While archivists have been careful to separate archives from data or collections, today the proliferation of meaning is sometimes synonymous with confusion. For historian and archivist Dietmar Schenk, this expansion could be explained by the digital revolution of the early twenty-first century.5

  • 6 Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives.”
  • 7 Annegret Fauser, “Sound, Music, War and Violence: Listening from the Archive,” Transposition, no. H (...)
  • 8 Britta Lange, “Archival Silences as Historical Sources. Reconsidering Sound Recordings of Prisoners (...)
  • 9 Carolyn Birdsall and Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and (...)
  • 10 Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Andrew N. Weintraub, “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sou (...)

3The exponential production of cultural data on social networks and other platforms raises the question of what is and is not an archive, from its use to its re-use, from its rewriting to its misappropriation. Eric Ketelaar, for his part, has shifted the focus from the ontological limits of archives to the process of archivalization.6 Sound archives, on the other hand, are a special kind of document. In the form of recorded sounds (voice, music or sound environments), their existence and knowledge of them through listening – whether individual or collective – is dependent on the use of a technological medium. One of the consequences of taking an interest in these archiving processes is recognizing that every archive is situated: deciding what deserves to be preserved and what doesn’t is never objective. Archives are subjective assemblages which, as Annegret Fauser reminds us, “privilege certain experiences over others”.7 For this reason, it is essential to listen to the voices that are audible and those that are silenced,8 to take into account the power relationships and technologies at work,9 and to question the processes of both production and dispossession of knowledge.10

  • 11 Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Laëtitia Atlani-Duault, “Sounds of Survival, Weaponization of Sounds: Expl (...)
  • 12 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archi (...)
  • 13 Giovanna Zapperi, ed., L’avenir du passé: art contemporain et politiques de l’archive (Rennes: Pres (...)
  • 14 Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray, “Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime,” Twentieth-Cent (...)

4As we mentioned before, archives are at once spaces of power and sites of memory.11 They are “the loci of power of the present to control what the future will know of the past”.12 As a result, artistic practices that explore sound archives have the capacity to sensitively transform our visions of the past and to produce new knowledge. As Giovanna Zapperi asserts, “artists question the authority of the document – its testimonial and objective nature – while proposing to think of art as a practice of knowledge”.13 The creative possibilities of sound archives are significant: reactivating the voices of the past through listening, proposing new narratives, exploring what is said and unsaid in collective memory and official history, and making the struggles of the past resonate in order to understand those of the present.14

5If archives are the remnants of the ebb and flow of our stories and how they came to be, then they call on all those who work with them to reactivate them, while paying attention to the ethical and cultural gaps produced by their creative decontextualization. What do artists do with archives? This question, central to this Filigrane special issue, reveals the richly interdisciplinary tensions between archival science, historical science, and the sciences of art and creation.

Re-composing and re-creating with sound archives

6The articles in this Filigrane special issue explore the creative potential of sound archives, often neglected by institutions responsible for the management, conservation and safekeeping of cultural heritage. What is the rationale behind the creation of sound archives? What is the link between sound archives and collective memory? To what extent do sound archives allow us access to oral histories embedded within communities? How can artists draw on sound archives to create counter-hegemonic historical narratives? What are the aesthetic, legal and political consequences of these re-uses? What are the creative processes at work in the re-use of sound archives? What links are there between re-writings of sound archives and artistic forms such as sound documentaries, installations or soundscapes? What listening practices are derived from these artistic productions? In the first article of the issue, Loïc Bertrand explores the difference between the written archive and the sound archive, starting from the fundamental notion of listening and the passage of time. The author addresses the question of perception as constitutive of the archive, and argues that repeated listening transforms the archive and relaunches the ‘archiving process’.

7The articles by Ariana Phillips-Hutton, Eugénie Tessier and Corsin Vogel explore what the archive does to our memories; from the referential process of identification to the reactivation of a fading history of practices, the archive, be it the fruit of a process of re-appropriation, reconstitution or re-composition, enables us to put the history of our individual and collective memories back to work. Remembering ourselves thus becomes a political and aesthetic undertaking, necessarily transhistorical, that questions creative processes and situates them in an equidistant (rather than linear) history. Ariana Phillips-Hutton explores works created from sound archives, by contemporary composers such as William Basinski (1958-), Leyland James Kirby (1974-) and Mary Kouyoumdjian (1983-). Through listening, Phillips-Hutton analyses the different ways in which the archives are used and transformed, as well as the silences and stories set forth by the works.

8Eugénie Tessier, for her part, develops a critical reflection on the notion of ‘re-composing’ sound archives in the context of contemporary performances by artist Rémi Belliveau. Far from theories of reenactment, re-composing from archives is, for Tessier, a kind of transhistorical gesture that involves “displacing linear and literary conceptions of the transmission and reproduction of cultural memories, and arguing that the re-composition of musical archive(s) makes explicit the intertemporal qualities of embodied representations of the past in the present”. Here, re-composition as fictionalisation of the real becomes the place where conservation and preservation can dialogue, a condition for revisiting a history that has been or is about to be forgotten. Finally, artist and researcher Corsin Vogel presents his creative process based on the re-use of sound documents for compositions or contextualised installations. Vogel proposes a typology of sound document re-appropriation at work in his creative process, which he identifies in three categories: “a literal use of the sound archive with its original semantic content, a more abstract use through radical transformation of sound, and a mixed use, which plays with our perceptual boundaries”.

9Sound archives are remnants that, as Fanny Dujardin, Bastien Lambert and David Christoffel state in their articles, need to be ‘re-grasped’ throughout their creative process – from editing to listening. For Dujardin and Lambert, the voice of the recorded archive is that of an absent present. Based on Yann Paranthoën’s singular creative gesture, Dujardin and Lambert study the archive-material, caught between two temporalities: that of recording and that of contemporary listening. Through an analysis of the radio work On Nagra (1987), the authors investigate what this work says about “the materiality of the archive, the symbolic and social characteristics of the recording gesture, and the memory produced by the radiophonic remnant”. The authors show the archive-becoming, meaning the way in which sound archives resonate in the present and how the radio medium participates in a mise en récit of reality. David Christoffel’s article is an artist’s text that presents and analyses one of his acousmatic works, La voix de Foucault, commissioned by IRCAM’s ManiFeste Festival and premiered in Paris in 2014. While describing his own creative process, the composer puts forward an analogy between this process, which proceeds by montage, and Foucault’s thinking, which Christoffel feels participates in the same kind of organisation. He makes his research-creation laboratory available to us, oscillating between precise exploration of different sources linked to available archives, compositional biases, and choice of textures and fragments. La voix de Foucault functions as a space where the author, the listeners, and Foucault himself meet in the present.

10Richard Begin’s article explores the expressive power of sound archives that produce an atmosphere haunted by ruin, disorientation, and exhaustion. Exploring works belonging to the Dark Ambient genre, the author offers a phenomenological exploration of the links between sound archives and musical creation. Lastly, in the interview with FLEE collective co-founder Olivier Duport, we discuss the collective’s work on sound archives from what are known as ‘oral tradition’ musical cultures. Apart from presenting the project itself, the interview highlights FLEE’s editorial, ethical and artistic approaches. Duport reflects on the essential questions that run through the project: How can the sound archives of oral musical cultures be curated? How can we make the sonic remnants and knowledge of these musical cultures widely available? How can they be restored in local areas? How can they be performed by artists from the fields of electronic, improvised and experimental music?

11Although the contributors to this issue do not aim to provide exhaustive answers to all the questions that the sound archive poses to history, their articles chart a rich landscape of possible artistic uses for sound remnants: from their epistemological scope to their creative potential. As documents and materials, archives are also a common good that scientists and artists explore in order to think critically about how our memories, past and future, are formed. If the archive is a construction, a selection, a shaping, then wouldn’t artistic creation based on archives give us the opportunity to experience our histories sensitively and pass them on critically to future generations by allowing them to be heard? Could our listening give silence back its voice?

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Bibliographie

Birdsall, Carolyn, and Viktoria Tkaczyk. “Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): S1–13. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0061.

Bohlman, Andrea F., and Peter McMurray. “Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime.” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572217000032.

Caillet, Aline, and Frédéric Pouillaude, eds. Un art documentaire: enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017.

Derrida, Jacques. Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne. Paris: Galilée, 1995.

Esclapez, Christine, and Caroline Boë. “Écoute(s) active(s) en ‘territoire-laboratoire’ infra-insulaire : Pigna, une maison de l’écoute.” In Dos ou face au monde, habiter les îles. Marseille: Imbernon, forthcoming.

Farge, Arlette. Le Goût de l’archive. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989.

Fauser, Annegret. “Sound, Music, War and Violence: Listening from the Archive.” Transposition, Hors-série 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4310.

Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

Hoffmann, Anette, and Phindezwa Mnyaka. “Hearing Voices in the Archive.” Social Dynamics 41, no. 1 (2015): 140–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.985467.

Ketelaar, Eric. “(Dé) Construire l’archive.” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 82, no. 2 (2006): 65–70. https://doi.org/10.3917/mate.082.0065.

Ketelaar, Eric. “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.” Archival Science 1, no. 2 (2001): 131–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435644.

Lange, Britta. “Archival Silences as Historical Sources. Reconsidering Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War (1915-1918) from the Berlin Lautarchiv.” SoundEffects 7, no. 3 (2017): 46–60. https://doi.org/10.7146/se.v7i3.105232.

Leibovici, Franck. Des opérations d’écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom. Paris: Questions théoriques, 2020.

Lemay, Yvon, and Anne Klein. “Mémoire, archives et art contemporain.” Archivaria, 2012, 105–34.

Méchoulan, Éric. “Introduction. Des archives à l’archive.” Intermédialités, no. 18 (2011): 9–15. https://doi.org/10.7202/1009071ar.

Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Sylvia, and Andrew N. Weintraub. “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in Uganda.” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 2 (2012): 206–33. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.56.2.0206.

Phillips-Hutton, Ariana. “Performing the South African Archive in REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony.” Twentieth-Century Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 187–209. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572218000142.

Phillips-Hutton, Ariana. “Sonic Witnesses: Music, Testimony, and Truth.” Ethnomusicology Forum 30, no. 2 (2021): 266–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2021.1944254.

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Schenk, Dietmar. “Pouvoir de l’archive et vérité historique.” Translated by Philippe Forget. Écrire l’histoire, no. 13–14 (2014): 35–53. https://doi.org/10.4000/elh.463.

Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2 (2002): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.

Sprigge, Martha. “Tape Work and Memory Work in Post-War Germany.” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 49–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572217000056.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Subotić, Jelena. “Ethics of Archival Research on Political Violence.” Journal of Peace Research 58, no. 3 (2021): 342–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319898735.

Velasco-Pufleau, Luis. “On Luigi Nono’s Political Thought: Emancipation Struggles, Socialist Hegemony and the Ethic Behind the Composition of Für Paul Dessau.” Music and Politics XII, no. 2 (2018). https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0012.205.

Velasco-Pufleau, Luis. “Some Have Said I ‘Manipulated History’: René Lussier on Sound Archives, People’s Voices and Quebec History in Le Trésor de la Langue.” Music, Sound and Conflict, 26 September 2022. https://doi.org/10.58079/rny2.

Velasco-Pufleau, Luis, and Laëtitia Atlani-Duault. “Sounds of Survival, Weaponization of Sounds: Exploring Sonic Lieux de Mémoire.” Violence: An International Journal 1, no. 2 (2020): 265–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/2633002420976479.

Zapperi, Giovanna, ed. L’avenir du passé: art contemporain et politiques de l’archive. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016.

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Notes

1 Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989); Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); Jelena Subotić, “Ethics of Archival Research on Political Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 58, no. 3 (2021): 342–54, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343319898735.

2 Aline Caillet and Frédéric Pouillaude, eds., Un art documentaire: enjeux esthétiques, politiques et éthiques (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017); Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” Archival Science 1, no. 2 (2001): 131–41, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435644; Eric Ketelaar, “(Dé) Construire l’archive,” Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 82, no. 2 (2006): 65–70, https://doi.org/10.3917/mate.082.0065; Franck Leibovici, Des opérations d’écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom (Paris: Questions théoriques, 2020); Yvon Lemay and Anne Klein, “Mémoire, archives et art contemporain,” Archivaria, 2012, 105–34; Éric Méchoulan, “Introduction. Des archives à l’archive,” Intermédialités, no. 18 (2011): 9–15, https://doi.org/10.7202/1009071ar.

3 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995).

4 Dietmar Schenk, “Pouvoir de l’archive et vérité historique,” trans. Philippe Forget, Écrire l’histoire, no. 13–14 (2014): 35–53, https://doi.org/10.4000/elh.463.

5 Schenk.

6 Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives.”

7 Annegret Fauser, “Sound, Music, War and Violence: Listening from the Archive,” Transposition, no. Hors-série 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.4310.

8 Britta Lange, “Archival Silences as Historical Sources. Reconsidering Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War (1915-1918) from the Berlin Lautarchiv,” SoundEffects 7, no. 3 (2017): 46–60, https://doi.org/10.7146/se.v7i3.105232.

9 Carolyn Birdsall and Viktoria Tkaczyk, “Listening to the Archive: Sound Data in the Humanities and Sciences,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): S1–13, https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0061; Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Christine Esclapez and Caroline Boë, “Écoute(s) active(s) en ‘territoire-laboratoire ’ infra-insulaire : Pigna, une maison de l’écoute,” in Dos ou face au monde, habiter les îles (Marseille: Imbernon, forthcoming).

10 Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza and Andrew N. Weintraub, “The Audible Future: Reimagining the Role of Sound Archives and Sound Repatriation in Uganda,” Ethnomusicology 56, no. 2 (2012): 206–33, https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.56.2.0206; Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

11 Luis Velasco-Pufleau and Laëtitia Atlani-Duault, “Sounds of Survival, Weaponization of Sounds: Exploring Sonic Lieux de Mémoire,” Violence: An International Journal 1, no. 2 (2020): 265–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/2633002420976479.

12 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2 (2002): 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.

13 Giovanna Zapperi, ed., L’avenir du passé: art contemporain et politiques de l’archive (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 7. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are our own.

14 Andrea F. Bohlman and Peter McMurray, “Tape: Or, Rewinding the Phonographic Regime,” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 3–24, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572217000032; Anette Hoffmann and Phindezwa Mnyaka, “Hearing Voices in the Archive,” Social Dynamics 41, no. 1 (2015): 140–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2014.985467; Ariana Phillips-Hutton, “Performing the South African Archive in REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony,” Twentieth-Century Music 15, no. 2 (2018): 187–209, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572218000142; Ariana Phillips-Hutton, “Sonic Witnesses: Music, Testimony, and Truth,” Ethnomusicology Forum 30, no. 2 (2021): 266–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2021.1944254; Martha Sprigge, “Tape Work and Memory Work in Post-War Germany,” Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 49–63, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572217000056; Luis Velasco-Pufleau, “On Luigi Nono’s Political Thought: Emancipation Struggles, Socialist Hegemony and the Ethic Behind the Composition of Für Paul Dessau,” Music and Politics XII, no. 2 (2018), https://doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0012.205; Luis Velasco-Pufleau, “Some Have Said I ‘Manipulated History’: René Lussier on Sound Archives, People’s Voices and Quebec History in Le Trésor de la Langue,” Music, Sound and Conflict, September 26, 2022, https://doi.org/10.58079/rny2.

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Christine Esclapez et Luis Velasco-Pufleau, « Introduction: Exploring the Artistic Uses of Sonic Remnants »Filigrane [En ligne], 29 | 2024, mis en ligne le 29 novembre 2024, consulté le 07 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/filigrane/2376 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12sj3

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Auteurs

Christine Esclapez

Christine Esclapez est professeure de Musicologie à Aix-Marseille Université, membre de l’UMR PRISM UMR 7061. Ses axes de recherche sont profondément marqués par les orientations interdisciplinaires de la musicologie. Actuellement, elle conduit plusieurs projets de recherche autour des interactions entre archives et création en relation avec des structures culturelles. Elle a également réédité plusieurs textes des XXe et XXIe siècles en Esthétique de la musique et développe une réflexion épistémologique sur la recherche-création.

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Luis Velasco-Pufleau

Luis Velasco-Pufleau est professeur affilié à la Faculté de musique de l’Université de Montréal et ancien Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow à l’Université de Berne et l’Université McGill. Musicien et musicologue spécialiste de la musique des XXe et XXIe siècles, ses travaux portent sur les interactions entre création musicale et enjeux politiques contemporains. Il est rédacteur en chef du carnet de recherche Music, Sound and Conflict et membre élu de la Jeune Académie Suisse. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1330-974X

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