Stefan Kaegi
Your unique creations often feature the living—human or not—in a central role. What of it here?
S. K.: For this project, I’m going to use binaural recording which allows for maximum immersion when using headphones to create a soundscape. Sound has a tridimensional resonance, the perception of the voices is very natural, the listeners/spectators feel like they’re hearing people talking around them. It’s a new working method for me, I’m not doing interviews but starting a conversation between several people, which I then record. In Lausanne, we chose a psychanalyst, a forest warden who’s an expert in trees and in the land he looks after, a child, a Japanese singer, and a meteorologist who looks at what’s going on above and whose job is also an essential resource for plants, nature, and the living.
Chiara Bersani & Marco d’Agostin
In movement or hindered, the body is at the heart of your creations. What is its relation to the landscape here?
C. B. & M. D.: The landscape is an image at the edge of which stands the body. To some, like Marco, the image of the landscape is an invitation to enter. To others, like Chiara, it’s a rare image that asks the body to simply watch while finding the best position to do so. In Paysages partagés, we want to create a conversation between bodies and landscapes. The body of a disabled performer chosen from the local artistic community, the bodies of the spectators, asked to position and reposition themselves in response to the landscape and to the questions it raises, and the absent body we can only imagine. Those bodies move between three landscapes: a fictional one—an image with clearly-defined edges, where we have to find a space for imagination—, the natural landscape, unique and sometimes hostile, and finally our planet Earth, “landscape of landscapes” observed and described by the only human whose desire to see everything can finally be quenched, the astronaut.
Ari Benjamin Meyers
Your musical projects are conceived in a very particular relationship to space and time. How have you thought about sound, music - and their perception - in this space chosen ?
A. B. M. : After spending over three years on a previous work called Forecast which is a
large-scale music/theater performance on the theme of climate change originally created for the Volksbühne Berlin, it is exciting to now conceive a work that is not only about nature but actually takes place in nature. Land Art has always been a great inspiration to me; in Shared Landscapes I am able to work in a space between musical performance and those land-based works by artists that mean so much to me. Just as Land Art reuses, re-situates and re-contextualizes forms, shapes, situations, and structures found in nature, making music in and with the landscape makes possible the re-location of composed sound back into its ur-locations of the forrest, the meadow, the mountain and the stream.
El Conde de Torrefiel
The landscape is shaped by humans as a reflection of their perception of the world, it’s a political construct. How did you want to show this landscape and its connection to the perception we have of it?
T. B. & P. G.: The landscape is a paradigm that allows us to tame nature, to watch it while being protected from the threats it contains, a nature that has been cut off from its wild side. In the 21st century, there remain very few examples of nature that don’t carry the marks of humanity, in one way or another; our species has shaped and transformed nature, changing it in a deliberate, but not necessarily calculated, way. What we want to do here is highlight the artificial character of the landscape, the strategies imposed on nature to subdue it and make a profit from it. Capitalism as a landscape or the landscape of capitalism is tied to this duality between nature and culture, which coexist without having found an equilibrium. If capitalism is a wild system destructive for nature, nature itself is violent and devastating. It’s a fight between two opposite forces between which humans rehearse their savoir-faire as tamers.
Begum Erciyas & Daniel Kötter
We’ve always tried to master nature, to dominate it, collectively or individually. The landscape is shaped by humans as a reflection of their perception of the world. Your creations tackle the issues of the collective and the personal, but also of what is hidden, invisible. How did you bring those themes together for Paysages partagés?
B. E. & D. K.: The Paysages partagés project aims to bring 300 spectators/visitors to a landscape. Their very presence as group of humans and as individual bodies fundamentally transforms the landscape into occupied territory. The process of occupation, in military or colonial terms, always implies in the first place the fictional construction of an empty terrain—a no man’s land. The occupier must believe that fiction for the occupation to succeed. This tension between the presence and the absence of the bodies of the audience in the landscape will be at the heart of our contribution to Paysages partagés. We’ll use visualisation technology to change what’s visible and to expose the resistance of a landscape the audience is about to invade.
Émilie Rousset
You like to work on a documentary material based on interviews you’ve conducted. Who are the specialists you met for Paysages partagés, and how are their words grafted onto the landscape?
I choose people who, because of their job or their experience, have a specific area of expertise, in order to discover worlds I didn’t know, vocabularies I’m unfamiliar with. For Paysages partagés, I looked into different ways of perceiving and using the landscape. Through the eyes of the director of a federation of environmental NGOs who specialises in the Common Agricultural Policy, we watch how agricultural, viticultural, or forest machinery works, and we listen to ecosystems with the ears of a bio-acoustician. Those interviews conducted in an office in Brussels or in a university lab are then performed in the open by actors. I like it when theatre opens up different ways to access reality and creates a shift in our understanding. I also like to play on the shift from reality to its representation with a playful back-and-forth.
Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz
Your creations use language, sounds, and moving bodies to create a unique geometry of space and a unique soundscape. How do those elements work together within the natural environment of Paysages partagés?
S. D. & V. R.: There’s a complex network of non-human events constantly happening around us and which we don’t perceive because we are incapable of recognising or naming them. Some of the questions raised in this audio guide are linked to this kind of ignorance, which alienates us and isolates us from the rest of the elements which make up and inhabit the landscape, be they animal, vegetal, or mineral. Here, we’re substituting the monotony of both our human voices to the diversity and complexity of the sounds of a natural landscape thanks to the use of earphones. They take us away from a place while inviting us to a sort of immersion into sound, which can change our mode of presence and show us a different way of perceiving our environment. In that sense, we’re trying to simulate a wandering of the mind to accompany the wandering of the bodies through the landscape, in the shape of an inner and intimate dialogue of our voices with each listener.