Wacken, Strasbourg

2024-03-18T16:41:43+01:00

Dompter les rivières (Tame the rivers)

Photo: ©Naohiro Ninomiya

Details

Price : Free

Age : 10+

Duration: 1h


Organiser

Festival Musica
Le Maillon – Scène européenne

Place

Wacken district
Strasbourg

Starting point: Theatre le Maillon

DOCUMENTARY . PATCHWORK . MUTATION

“WELCOME TO WACKEN!

Bounded by the Ill to the north-east,

Avenue Herrenschmidt to the west,

the Place de Bordeaux to the south and crossed by the Aar and the Marne-Rhine canal.

Wacken means

“small stones”

We are
where the Rhine used to run.

here, for a long time, it was nothing

the end of the town

wet land

where no one lives”

Dompter les rivières (Tame the rivers) is a multi-faceted, polyphonic, geo-localised soundwalk that takes you on a stroll through the many facets of Wacken, a patchwork district undergoing constant change.

A guiding character, inspired by the Tunisian fortune-teller who was present at the 1924 colonial exhibition, takes us through centuries and spaces. She allows us to navigate between her present, our present, and a more distant future (2123). Her voice intersects with others that are more neutral, factual, passionate, poetic or political. Dompter les rivières is also the story of a place that stages itself according to the ideologies that inhabit it. A wild place, veined with water, which little by little, from one narrative to the next, gives way to a utilitarian environment, completely under control.
But beneath the backdrop of this perpetual comedy, the water is always flowing peacefully, looking for the right gaps to gush out.

A soundwalk available on the dedicated application – GOH

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Gaëtan Gromer, born in 1978, is a sound composer, artist and director who lives and works in Strasbourg. He is the artistic director of Les Ensembles 2.2. He regularly brings his work into conversation with other disciplines, and has notably worked with Maria La Ribot, Valérie Manteau, Hélène Gaudy, Etienne Fanteguzzi, Sebastian Dicenaire, Eve Risser, Lucie Taïeb, Clara Olivares, LNLO, Samuel et Léo Henry, luvan, Zahra Poonawala, Stéphane Perger, Espèce de collectif…

He regularly performs and exhibits in Strasbourg (Musica, Ososphère, ONR, TNS, PMC, Maillon, Pôle Sud, etc.), as well as at MAMCO (Geneva), CAC (Vilnius), CCAM (Vandoeuvre), Gymnase (Roubaix), Laboral (Gijon), Transient (Paris), Accès)s( (Pau), Lieu Multiple (Poitiers), Contemporary Art Biennale (Sélestat), Nuit Blanche (Brussels), Digital Life (Rome), Electric Nights (Athens)… 

Eve Risser is a composer, pianist and improviser whose music is rooted equally in jazz, improvisation, the written tradition and contemporary music. After entering the jazz class at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, she won a conservatory prize in 2008, as well as a soloist prize at the Concours National de Jazz de la Défense. In 2019, she created the Red Desert Orchestra, following a strong interest in Africa and a reflection on the place of the musician in Occident.

Antoine Spindler – Trained at the Strasbourg Conservatory in the classes of Ana Haas (violin) and Claude Ducroq (viola), as well as at the University of Strasbourg in musicology, Antoine Spindler has trained (Ircam, Fastlane, PML…) and specialized in electroacoustic and mixed music. He teaches in the Electroacoustic Creation and Interpretation class at the Conservatoire and L’Académie Supérieure de Musique-Hear in Strasbourg. He currently plays with the trio Jafta, with whom he released the album Traces, and with the duo Svië, with whom he created the album Port Data. His experiences have enabled him to collaborate with various ensembles and musicians (Linéa, Live Animated Orchestra, the Ethos quartet, Plurium, Clara Olivares, Eve Risser etc.) as well as with different authors (Hélène Gaudy, Jean Fauque, Valérie Manteau, Sébastien Dicenaire, Lucie Taïeb etc.).

Lucie Taïeb was born in Paris in 1977. She passed the German agrégation in 2002 and obtained a PhD in comparative literature in 2008. She is currently a lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Brest. Her writings span a range of genres, including poetry, novels and essays, and she regularly works with artists. Lucie Taïeb has published several collections of poetry, as well as two novels, both published by Éditions de l’Ogre. Her second novel, Les échappées, was awarded the Prix Wepler in 2019. She is also a translator, notably of Austrian poets including Ernst Jandl and Friederike Mayröcker.

The city of Strasbourg, the Région Grand Est, the FEDER, the Collectivité Européenne d’Alsace (CEA), the DRAC Grand-Est and CREAA – University of Strasbourg

Credits

Text: Lucie Taïeb

Realisation: Gaëtan Gromer

Music: Antoine Spindler, Eve Risser

Voices: Fayssal Benbahmed, Pauline Leurent, Maxime Pacaud and Marie Seux

Voices (German): Katja Harsdorf, Amélie Belohradsky, Moritz Pliquet, Christophe Palz

Recording studio: Innervision

Text translation: Tatjana Marwinski

Sound recordings: Antoine Spindler

Application: GOH

Production: Les Ensembles 2.2

Co-production: Festival Musica, Theater le Maillon – Scène européenne

Villerupt

2023-03-03T17:29:36+01:00

Les saisons invisibles

Illustration: ©Valérie Etterlen

Details

Available until december 2023


Price : Free


Organizer

Esch2022

Location

Villerupt
Meurthe-et-Moselle
France

Start :

Place Jeanne d’Arc


12+ years old

Duration: 60 / 90 minutes

DOCUMENTARY . WORKERS . VESTIGES

12+ years old

Duration: 60 / 90 minutes

The face of cities depends on the direction they look. Villerupt now looks towards Luxembourg, towards the border. The heart around which it was built has emptied and its arteries send its flow over there, on the other side. The heart is to be rebuilt, from a common memory. And lost moments of the Saisons Invisibles (invisible seasons).

Hélène Gaudy is a novelist; Christina Kubisch is a composer. Inspired by the history of the town of Villerupt, on the French-Luxembourg border, and the stories of its inhabitants, they created The Invisible Seasons

This journey tells the story of the region: the landscape shaped by the mines and the emptiness that remains today. It is an image of people, of the various successive waves of immigration; but also of the territory and of the nearby borders, which define the work today. A multiplicity of stories, moments and memories obtained thanks to the testimonies of the inhabitants, who dialogue with the written text: points of view that intersect and complement each other.

The Invisible Seasons was created as part of the In the field project, for Esch2022, European Capital of Culture.

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The musical composition is in keeping with the theme of boundaries: it uses different sources of sounds found on the spot, captured beyond the usual acoustic noises: the invisible waves of Villerupt, the electromagnetic fields, the contact microphones, the hidden vibrations.

Text and music come together to create a photograph of the territory and its history. Through the seasons that punctuate the sound journey, borders follow one another: those crossed in the past, the one that separated France and Germany, the one now crossed by French people working in Luxembourg. This shows their shifting, arbitrary, but also emotional character. Living in a border town is a series of possible changes of scenery, a fragility at the same time as a wealth.

Hélène Gaudy is a novelist. After studying visual arts, she led numerous projects combining writing, image and landscape. She has published art books, books for young people and several stories, including Vues sur la Mer (Les Impressions nouvelles, 2006, second selection for the Prix Médicis), Plein Hiver (Actes Sud, 2014), and Un Monde sans Rivage (Actes Sud, 2009) which was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. She is a member of the Inculte collective and the editorial board of the magazine La Moitié du Fourbi. 

Christina Kubisch, born in Bremen in 1948, belongs to the first generation of sound artists. Although she is best known for her sound installations and electroacoustic compositions, her practice also extends to video and visual arts. Since 2003, she has been making the ‘Electrical Walks’ series around the world, sound walks in urban spaces, where electromagnetic fields are amplified. Christina Kubisch has taught audiovisual arts in Berlin, Paris, Saarbrücken and Oxford. She has received numerous awards, including the Giga-Hertz 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

With the support of Esch2022, European Capital of Culture, as well as the French Ministry of Culture, the DRAC Grand Est, the Région Grand Est, the Centre National de la Musique, the Collectivité Européenne d’Alsace, the Département Meurthe-et-Moselle, the Ville d’Esch-sur-Alzette, the Ville et Eurométropole de Strasbourg, LISER (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research), the Musica Festival and Puzzle Thionville.

In partnership with Residhome Luxembourg and the Cottage Luxembourg.

Credits

Text: Hélène Gaudy Music: Christina KubischSound recording: Christina Kubisch, Marc NamblardIllustration: Valérie EtterlenVoices: Matëo Granger, Mathilde Melero (French version), Eli Finberg (English version)

Voice studio: Innervision

Artistic direction: Gaëtan Gromer

Production: Les Ensembles 2.2

With sound extracts by Daniel Brachetti from the short film “Des quetsches pour l’hiver”, J.-P. Menichetti, 1974

Acknowledgements : Tom Thiel, sound engineer

Thil

2023-03-03T17:27:50+01:00

La mine est une bouche

Illustration: ©Valérie Etterlen

Details

Available until december 2023


Price : Free


Organizer

Esch2022

Location

Thil
Meurthe-et-Moselle
France

Début du parcours : in front of the Tiercelet mines


16+ years old

Duration: 30 / 45 min

POETRY . MEMORY . BIOGRAPHIES

16+ years old

Duration: 30 / 45 min

Participants enter the mine as if entering a mouth. A dark den, where the wind makes the barbed wire creak like ropes and the crematoria echo with a dull lament.

La mine est une bouche (‘The mine is a mouth‘) takes you into the dark depths of the Tiercelet mines in Thil, where, during the Second World War, Jewish deportees and Soviet resistance fighters were forced to undertake hard labour by the Nazis to manufacture V1 missiles.

It is the story of these bodies that writer Marina Skalova and composer Jacob Kirkegaard tell through this sound and poetic creation, which probes the traces left by the war and seeks to translate them into physical experience.

Outside the mine, the trail continues to the former site of the Thil concentration camp, where six poems bring out the unspeakable in the remains of history.

La mine est une bouche was created as part of the In the field project for Esch2022, European Capital of Culture.

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Inspired by interviews with the inhabitants of Thil and the documentary film Rodina by Jean-Louis Sonzogni, La mine est une bouche questions the borders that intrude on bodies until they break them. At once a documented fiction, a historical evocation and a plunge into the digestive corridors, the work slips into the very bowels of the Second World War.

From the trachea to the intestines, each bodily boundary is a threshold bearing the trace of the abuse inflicted on the prisoners. From their arrest in Minsk in Belarus to their deportation to France, to their escape before the Liberation and their final return to the Soviet Union, the different moments of their History are translated into a living journey. 

An attempt to capture the sensory vestiges of history, between the rustling of the forest, the chirping of birds and the flow of water taken from the mine where the prisoners were subjected to forced labour.

Marina Skalova is a writer, playwright and translator of German and Russian. She writes at the intersection of languages and literary genres. Her works include the bilingual poetry collection Atemnot (Souffle court) (Cheyne Editeur, Prix de la Vocation en poésie, 2016), the narrative Exploration du flux (Seuil, 2018), the play La chute des comètes et des cosmonautes (L’Arche, 2019) and Silences d’exils, a book and exhibition produced in collaboration with the photographer Nadège Abadie (Editions d’en bas, 2020). Her texts give rise to readings, performances, stagings and collaborations with choreographers. She regularly performs on stage with musicians, for rock readings-concert with Simone Aubert (Hyperculte, Tout bleu) or by combining her texts with the contemporary music of the duo KleXs.

Jacob Kirkegaard is a Danish sound artist. In his works, he seeks to reflect on complex, inaccessible or interesting places and environments through immersive sound explorations. His works deal with themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, border walls in global and metaphorical contexts and melting ice in the Arctic. He also creates works using otoacoustic emissions, sounds generated by the human ear. His work method stems from the use of sound recordings of tangible aspects of intangible themes. His sound creations have been released on labels such as Important Records (USA), Touch (UK) and Posh Isolation (DK). He has exhibited his work around the world, including at MoMA in New York, LOUISIANA – Museum of Modern Art and ARoS in Denmark, the Sydney Biennale in Australia, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

With the support of Esch2022, European Capital of Culture, as well as the French Ministry of Culture, the DRAC Grand Est, the Région Grand Est, the Centre National de la Musique, the Collectivité Européenne d’Alsace, the Département Meurthe-et-Moselle, the Ville d’Esch-sur-Alzette, the Ville et Eurométropole de Strasbourg, LISER (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research), the Musica Festival and Puzzle Thionville.

In partnership with Residhome Luxembourg and the Cottage Luxembourg.

Credits 

Text: Marina Skalova

Music: Jacob Kirkegaard

Sound recording: Jacob Kirkegaard

Illustration: Valérie Etterlen

Voices: Amélie Belohradsky, Marina Skalova (French version), Ashley Billings, Nelly Henrion (English version)

Voice Studio: Innervision

Artistic Director: Gaëtan Gromer

Production: Les Ensembles 2.2

Acknowledgements: Gino Bertacco, Stéphane Brusco, Emmanuel Mittaut, Daniel Pascolini and the association Mémoire de la mine.

Jean-Louis Sonzogni for his documentary film Rodina.

Port du Rhin, Strasbourg

2023-03-22T13:48:51+01:00

Details

Price : Free


Organizer

Esch2022


Location

Quartier Port du Rhin, Strasbourg France

Start:

Point Coop, Rue du Port du Rhin

DOCUMENTARY . MEMORIES . FIRES

10+ years old

Duration: 60-90 min

‘In the middle of the night, at the end of a wharf in the Port du Rhin industrial zone, something was burning. Throughout the country, malfunctions were reported, but no one saw the data centre and its nebulous data disappear into the flames.

On the site, you have to observe, survey and decode the signs: listen to a landscape which, little by little, begins to tell a completely different story. Does memory smell when it burns? What do its ashes look like? The fire brings back other nights, other disappearances, other fires. Along the harbour docks, at the edge of the river and the alluvial forest, the mapping of a changing territory is taking shape – a cloud of voices, memories, images.”

Port Data is part of the In the field project, created for Esch2022, European Capital of Culture.

En savoir plus

A digital audio story, the work mixes fiction and musical composition, but is also enriched by the participation of the inhabitants who transmit life stories linked to the places, in order to anchor the project in the territory. Set across different places in the Port du Rhin in Strasbourg, Port Data invites you to wander around and (re)discover this area through sound.

Hélène Gaudy surveyed the Port du Rhin as a student at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg in the early 2000s. Now a novelist, she returns to the site to write a musical fiction inspired by the life of the neighbourhood, with composition by Gaëtan Gromer, Clara Olivares and Antoine Spindler.

Hélène Gaudy is a novelist. After studying visual arts, she led numerous projects combining writing, image and landscape. She has published art books, books for young people and several stories, including Vues sur la Mer (Les Impressions nouvelles, 2006, second selection for the Prix Médicis), Plein Hiver (Actes Sud, 2014), and Un Monde sans Rivage (Actes Sud, 2009) which was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt. She is a member of the Inculte collective and the editorial board of the magazine La Moitié du Fourbi.

Gaëtan Gromer leads a creative activity at a crossroads between composition, performance and multimedia installation. He uses the astonishing power of suggestion and immersion of sound to deliver a certain view of the world, a particular point of hearing, to ‘tell’ with sound. He is one of the winners of the Imagina Atlantica 2012 European Digital Arts Prize in Angoulême and wrote the music for Samuel Henry’s Juste l’embrasser, which won the SABAM prize at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in 2008.

Clara Olivares is a composer from Strasbourg. At the age of twenty-three, she wrote her first opera, Mary, for ensemble, puppets and live electronics, premiered in 2017 by Ensemble XXI.n. In 2019, she participated in the Académie Opéra en création of the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and won the Nicola DeLorenzo Composition Prize. In 2020, she was awarded the Beaumarchais-SACD grant for lyric writing with the librettist Chloé Lechat. She has been a laureate of the Banque Populaire Foundation since 2021. Clara Olivares is Associate Composer of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris for the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons.

Antoine Spindler is a violist and teacher at the Haute école des Arts du Rhin. A member of the Ethos Quartet and the Plurium Ensemble, he has also played with the Linéa Ensemble and the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra. He has performed on several stages, including the Festival Musica in Strasbourg, the Tonhalle in Zurich and the Asian-Pacific Contemporary Music Festival in Seoul, South Korea. He specialises in electroacoustic and mixed music, notably with the Live.Animated.Orchestra or as a member of the Jafta trio.

As part of the Festival Musica and Esch2022 – European Capital of Culture

Credits:

Texts : Hélène Gaudy

Music: Gaëtan Gromer, Clara Olivares, Antoine Spindler

Sound recording: Marc Namblard

With the participation of the Adastra Quartet

Actors : Anne-France Delarchand, Mathilde Melero, Milan Morotti, Jack Reinhardt, Audrey Vinel

Production: Les Ensembles 2.2

Coproduction: Festival Musica

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