“what we hear ¿- Sounds of Yerevan and Dilijan”, 2018, workshop and eight-channel sound installation
 
Expressed as an ambiguously affirmative question, what we hear examines the idea of listening as a pedagogical and collaborative process, an inclusive tool to reconsider how we hear, what we hear, who we hear.
 
Structured around a number of (collective) listening exercises and experiments taking place indoors and outdoors, the workshop aimed to introduce participants to practices of field recording and field listening. Each listening exercise was followed by group discussions, during which participants were invited to recollect and analyze what they heard, but also rethink how they hear.
 
A process that intended to bring them to a renewed perception of their direct acoustic environments – of the minute sounds that compose their everyday.
 
The workshop took place at TUMO Center for Creative Technologies in Yerevan and Dilijan, Armenia. It culminated in a public presentation, during which the recordings produced by the nineteen participants were presented as an eight-channel sound installation.
 
This track presents three of these recordings.

what we hear ¿- Sounds of Yerevan and Dilijan

"Untitled (I Love You)" is a series of context-specific, language-based interventions. Each iteration comprises recordings of the two same sentences, “I love you”, “you love me”, endlessly repeated by a single speaker, in one or several languages. Each repetition is done in different tones, from supplication to neutral detachment or joyful excitement. The audio is broadcasted by two loudspeakers set as to face each other.

Credits:
Voice: Lesoko Saebe
Recording: Mapumba Cilombo
Editing: Vincent Chomaz

www.vincentchomaz.art

All rights reserved. The copyright for these audio pieces are reserved. Any replication or use of content such as images, audio and texts is not permitted without Vincent Chomaz’s written consent.

Untitled (Ndiya Kuthanda)

"The wind will carry us", 2016, a series of intimate and anonym audio recordings of people singing a cappella in their mother tongues—in Dari, Farsi, or Kurdish. The singings were collected in a village located in Southern Germany.

"The wind will carry us" was conceived to function at a visceral level. It focuses on that instant of shared intimacy that exists beyond language between someone singing and someone listening; between a singer and the wind. It is an invitation to hear and listen; an attempt to freely encounter people – refugees – as equals and beyond prejudice.

Singers: Agi Ahmadi, Aziz Ahmadi, Ahmadsha Ghafouri,  Ahmad Khalil, Azmary Raessi

www.vincentchomaz.art

All rights reserved. The copyright for these audio pieces are reserved. Any replication or use of content such as images, audio and texts is not permitted without Vincent Chomaz’s written consent.

Aziz Ahmadi – Rasme Zamooneh

Ahmad Khalil – Te Sherani

"I have seen the other side of you", 2016, an unadvertised intervention wherein a concealed speaker was made to broadcast a series of strange personal stories.

The piece was based on archival materials collected in Berlin by the artist as part of a long-term, participatory research project that focuses on the collection of dreams within different given geographical areas to observe the influence of each site’s particular historical, societal, and cultural conditions on individual and collective psyches. The selected dreams were translated into Mandarin before being given to two Beijing-based voice actors to retell. The work was thought as a disruptive gesture which proposed to investigate issues of displacement and cultural translation.

This iteration of the project was curated by Antonie Angerer and Anna-Viktoria Eschbach for Remixing the Local.

Voices: Zhuo Wei, Jackie Zhang

I Have Seen the Other Side of You

I have seen the other side of you

Vincent Chomaz is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator interested in associative and informal forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning site-specific sound installations and interventions, listening workshops, as well as participatory and collaborative research formats, his work focuses on listening as a social, political, and aesthetic practice – an associative and empathetic tool to investigate collective dynamics as a network of subjective narratives, fictions, and memories.

Chomaz has presented his work internationally at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India, 2020, online), The Lab at Darat al Funun (Amman, 2019), Culture Space Yang (Jeju City, South Korea, 2019), ZK/U Center for Arts and Urbanistics (Berlin, 2019 & 2015), Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, 2018, curated by Travers), MMAG Foundation (Amman, 2018), Grace (Athens, 2018, curated by In Art We Trust), RAW Material Company (Dakar, 2018), Beijing One Arts Festival (Beijing, 2016), Errant Bodies (Berlin, 2015), Infecting the City 2015 (Cape Town, 2015), The Stage (Kuala Lumpur, 2015), or Describing Architecture 2014 (Dublin, 2014) among others.

www.vincentchomaz.art

All rights reserved. The copyright for these audio pieces are reserved. Any replication or use of content such as images, audio and texts is not permitted without Vincent Chomaz’s written consent.

Vincent Chomaz

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