Port du Rhin, Strasbourg - Les Ensembles 2.2

Port Data

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

The creation

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.

The artists

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.