Mélia Roger

Installation

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Tendre Phonocène is rooted in the industrial forests around my home (Rhône). Inspired by recent scientific studies of acoustic enrichment, which have shown that sound can be used to help repair damaged environments, I set out to adopt this method by inviting sound recordists to play recordings in forest plantations and in clearings.  The sounds we played had been 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 act of acoustic care, we play those sounds back in what is a kind of reactivation of a past soundscape. Like a distant memory of extinct species, might these sounds perhaps have a positive impact on these places? The term “Phonocene” is taken directly from Donna Haraway, and used by Vinciane Despret to propose the philosophical concept of an era when 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? How do we give these voices back? The installation Tendre Phonocène documents this research.

Mélia Roger

Artist and sound engineer Mélia Roger was born in 1996 in France. Engaged in practical work, she divides her time between immersive sound libraries for Atmos films and a more intimate and experimental relationship with sound recording. Passionate about ethology and tracking, she devotes her listening to non-human entities and empathic relationships with the living. After a technical course at the ENS Louis-Lumière, then a transdisciplinary course at the ZHdK, she is now at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains to work on a doctoral thesis on the relationship between sound art and acoustic ecology (research/creation), in partnership with the University of Lille. Winner of the Phonurgia Nova Awards (2021) and the Sound of the Year Award (2023), she has been published on the Presque Tout, Biodiversità Recordsand Fonns of Minutiaelabels and has exhibited in Paris (France), Geneva (Switzerland), Zurich (Switzerland), Namur (Belgium), Berlin (Germany) and Serrinha do Alambari (Brazil).

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