Oniropolis is the fruit of a creative process familiar to the three artists: immersion in the territory, then the use of the material collected – sounds, stories, testimonies of the inhabitants – as inspiration for the writing and composition. 

For Schiltigheim, this content was enriched by the participation of pupils from eight classes in the town’s schools, who shared their view of their living environment through anecdotes and stories, real or imaginary. Some students even had the opportunity to create a ‘detour’: a small exclusive soundwalk, the result of the educational work carried out with them.

All this material served as a starting point for the artists to create an intriguing literary and sound universe that was immersed in the place. The result is accessible on the GOH mobile application, which uses geolocation to offer you an immersive experience that evolves throughout your walk.

Sebastian Dicenaire was born in Alsace, and now works in Brussels. Writer, poet, author of radio fiction and podcasts, he uses language both in writing and through sound and video. He has published works of poetry (Döner-kebab, ed. Héros-Limite; Personnologue, ed. Clou dans le fer; Dernières Nouvelles de l’Avenir, ed. Atelier de l’agneau… ). In his performances, he tries to push the limits of the spectator’s imagination by encouraging them to create their own ‘mental cinema’, mixing text and sound. His radio fiction blends many genres – poetry and science fiction, mythology and technology – and has won awards at several festivals. 

Svië is a duo made up of Gaëtan Gromer and Antoine Spindler, sound artists and composers of electro-acoustic music.

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.

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.

Region Grand-Est and DRAC Grand-Est

Belval is a delimited space, a place rich in history, which does not leave much room for the imaginary, for wandering, for the margin, for the unfinished. This gave the authors the desire to propose a counter-narrative, to imagine the other side of the scenery.

Thus, the neighbourhood served as a place of embodiment for the text, setting its shape and limits. The geography of the streets structured the narrative, imposed chapters, divisions, breathing spaces, a dividing line. This transposition of the fictional universe into the real world also served as a backdrop for the various themes of the story: data processing, the relationship between the digital and the living, the abuses of new technologies, etc.

The musical compositions convey the strangeness emanating from Belval. A modern, changing, multi-layered place, but one that seems to float permanently on the edge of unreality, where it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is authentic and what is not, what is ‘finished’ and what is being built. A feeling that strongly coloured the music.

Belval is a place of visible traces, of sounds that are interpreted rather than identified. The composers wanted to play with this boundary by proposing ultra-worked sounds which nevertheless seem perfectly natural or by using almost raw recordings which, out of context, seem completely stylised. If you listen carefully, certain sounds seem to stand out, but each time, something sows a seed of doubt…

Sebastian Dicenaire was born in Alsace, and now works in Brussels. Writer, poet, author of radio fiction and podcasts, he uses language both in writing and through sound and video. He has published works of poetry (Döner-kebab, ed. Héros-Limite; Personnologue, ed. Clou dans le fer; Dernières Nouvelles de l’Avenir, ed. Atelier de l’agneau… ). In his performances, he tries to push the limits of the spectator’s imagination by encouraging them to create their own ‘mental cinema’, mixing text and sound. His radio fiction blends many genres – poetry and science fiction, mythology and technology – and has won awards at several festivals.

Svië is a duo made up of Gaëtan Gromer and Antoine Spindler, sound artists and composers of electro-acoustic music.

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.

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.

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, the LISER (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research), the Musica Festival and the Puzzle Thionville.

In partnership with Residhome Luxembourg and the Cottage Luxembourg.

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.

Influenced by Jeff Noon’s approach in Cobralingus, the texts have been distorted, reworked and reconstructed to create something new. By merging the legend of La Femme Sauvage with the valley’s industrial past, the latter becomes central to the story and the text is completely transformed.

The trail gives an important place to borders, which are at the heart of the folklore surrounding the legend of La Femme Sauvage: borders between our world and the underworld, between human and animal, between civilisation and wild life, between the damned and the saved. Some boundaries are already present in local myths, such as that of the Cron Stone, under which La Femme Sauvage lay, allowing herself to be drawn into the underworld. Others are generated by the random process used for writing: this creates a tension where the writer does not have full control of the final form of the stories and the structure of the text, constantly standing at the border between readability and chaos.

The music, for its part, lets us perceive chords ‘in suspense’, which never really end, creating a tension, an uncertainty as to the emotions transmitted. The chords are played in sequence but also alone, each one almost overflowing on the next, each one constituting a transition towards a new state of perception. All of this occurs in parallel with a shimmering, shifting ambience in the background, made up of sounds mostly recorded on site. These are shaped to evoke a sense of life, to show the soul of the place, but also the stories hidden behind the rocks and trees, under the houses, buried in the mines and in the earth itself.

Sound design is not intended to serve as background noises for storytelling, but to complement, contrast, and, in some places, conflict with stories. By walking from one place to another in Lasauvage, the sound environments offered to the listener bring out specific aspects of the places and interweave them with the writing. This approach has extracted elements that fully connect the listener to words and earth, sometimes suggesting hidden things just beyond the bounds of immediate perception and consciousness. Listened to through headphones, the sounds create an incredibly close experience of the place, while connecting the listener to a hidden character that is not easily visible on the surface of Lasauvage.

Steve Toase is an author. Born in the north of England, he currently lives in Munich, Germany. In his disconcerting works of fiction, trees can hitchhike and bears play chess in sunny squares. He regularly writes for the monthly Fortean Times and the webzine Folklore Thursday. His fiction has been published in numerous magazines, as well as in The Best Horror of The Year anthology. From 2014 he worked with Becky Cherriman and Imove on the Haunt project, about the homeless in the town of Harrogate and the disturbing contrast between their situation and the town’s economic prosperity. His first collection of short stories, To Drown In Dark Water, was published in April 2021 by Undertow Publications 

Eric Holm is an American sound artist and composer. His work is tied to specific locations: he uses field recordings, inspired by various places, to create immersive soundscapes. A diver for 20 years, his compositions are based on the many dimensions of the sea and his personal relationship with it. His first LP, Andøya (2014), was a field project made from recordings of communication pylons that connected listening stations on a remote island in the Norwegian Arctic. It was followed by Barotrauma (2016), made from recordings near Oslo. His latest work, Surface Variations (2020), a reflection on Debussy’s Sea, was made during a dive on the south coast of England. Eric has performed throughout Europe and the UK. His work is published on Subtext.

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.

The stories span several eras, from the time of the Romans to modern times. They are intrinsically linked to the forest and to the mining activity that has structured the region over the centuries. Since La Borne de Fer does not have any legend, the artists themselves invented legends from the history of iron mining and a character who had haunted the woods since antiquity.

In the writing of the stories, the theme of borders is very present. It is approached at different levels: the first, most obvious, is that which concerns the border between the space of the forest and more civilised spaces (town, fields, farms, etc.). Another has been established between the human and the monster, or rather the way we view the monster. We can also envisage a boundary between the time of the walk and the spaces of time summoned by the stories.

Other themes are reflected in the texts, in particular that of the lure of profit. The traces of iron mining in the landscape, visible everywhere in the forest, are a reminder of how many people throughout history have sought to enrich themselves in this territory. The trail chooses to transpose this quest for wealth by creating a legend in which the men are not only looking for ore, but a real treasure hidden in the heart of La Borne de Fer.

The musical composition is part of an already very rich sound landscape.

At the beginning of the journey, the voice of a narrator appears on a large path separating forest and field. The male voice is that of the person who created the app that the listener is using to find a lost treasure. We also hear a female voice trying to lure the listener into the forest, as she has been trapped there since ancient times.

The contrast between these two voices creates a clear boundary between the wilderness (the woman trying to lure the listener into the forest) and the civilised world (the game master who created the app). Throughout the trail, we hear a voice that oscillates between the spoken and the sung, in order to recall the world of tales, which have been accompanied by instruments since the dawn of time. Antoine Spindler plays pizzicato (plucked strings) on his viola to recall this aspect.

Matthieu Epp is a professional storyteller who performs in France, Belgium and Quebec; on theatre stages, and also in storytelling festivals, media libraries, retirement homes and schools. Between 2013 and 2018, he developed the project ‘Il y a des portes’ (‘There are doors’), a mix of live performance, podcast, video game, digital writing and improvisation. Winner of the Tango&Scan scheme, he has been giving video game creation workshops in secondary schools since 2017. He is also developing the YouTube channel of the company Rebonds d’histoires, and has created ‘Les Runes d’Odin’, a show that combines video games and narration, where the audience’s participation influences the story told.

Svië is a duo made up of Gaëtan Gromer and Antoine Spindler, sound artists and composers of electro-acoustic music.

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.

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.

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.

A land of extremes, both an ancient fossil quarry and a place of renewal, of lichens, mosses and orchids. A place of extraction and exploitation, but also of rebirth. Scientific references are present throughout the text. It also includes biological and naturalistic principles.

All these themes are dealt with in parallel with the theme of borders. These are numerous: between the earth and the cosmos, between the past and the future, between the surface and what lies beneath. We also explore the frontier of reality: what if there was another Earth? What if the Schifflange Nature Reserve was where two dimensions intersect?

Luvan is an author. Her work focuses on the development of complex imaginary places, both utopian and dystopian, allowing her to comment on and anticipate current events. For her, fiction is a tool for social and political reflection. Passionate about sound and traditional oral materials, she also writes plays, performs and makes radio productions. She is an active member of the science fiction writers’ collective Zanzibar alongside, among others, Sabrina Calvo, Alain Damasio, Catherine Dufour and Léo Henry. A historian by training, luvan (real name Marie-Aude Matignon) lived in Africa, the Pacific, France, China, Scandinavia and Belgium before moving to Germany.

Electroacoustic composer, sound engineer and teacher, Charo Calvo is originally from Spain and currently lives in Brussels. After performing as a dancer with the Belgian company Ultima Vez, she studied electroacoustic composition at the Brussels Conservatory. Her work is developed through different media, and is broadcasted at international events. She has received several awards, including the Marulic Prize 2018 Croatia and the Grand Prix Nova Bucharest 2019. She was selected to represent Belgium at the ISCM 2020 World with her work ‘The Grass’ and is the winner of the Phonurgia Nova 2021 Prize with ‘Vagues de Chaleur’ (‘Heat Waves’).

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.

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.