Lecture by James Giroudon – Listening and Seeing… elements of sonic scenography

June 8, 4 PM

Over the course of the 20th century, sound has become integral to all areas of contemporary art, enabling the creation of crossover artistic flows and interdisciplinary experiences. The musical piece in the form of an art-installation is becoming a global structure for perception, one which immerses the viewer in the physical experience of sound and light waves. Using the examples of his own recent projects — Musica Mobile at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan) and the Sound all Around exhibition at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art (St Petersburg), James Giroudon will give a talk on the scenography of sound, which establishes the drama of time and space. Of particular importance is the experience of sensory perception. The exhibition space resonates like an entire musical instrument, with the architectural lines becoming the basis for a musical score made up of shape, form and sound.

The lecture will include a screening of the video Le lieu avant la danse and a talk with the artist Matt Coco (Lyon, France). The film was made as part of the installation The Ghost, which will be displayed at the Sound all Around exhibition at the Erarta Museum, and is devoted to the concept of silence as a mental space which foreshadows the creation of sound.

The lecture will be given in French with synchronous translation into Russian. Admission is free and places are limited. Please book in advance (link in Russian)

James Giroudon is a graduate of Pierre Schaeffer and Guy Reibel’s class at the Paris Conservatoire. From 1982 to 1990 he taught at the ENM in Saint-Étienne, where he set up the electroacoustic section, and in 1992 he was appointed director of the Arts of the Spectacle degree course at the University of Caen. In 1981, he and Pierre-Alain Jaffrennou founded the studio Grame, where he worked as co-director. In 1992 he created the Musiques en Scène festival, which in 2002 became a biennale. Since 1998, he has been co-curator along with Thierry Raspail of the Musiques en Scène audio art exhibition at the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art. He was invited to curate the Belluard festival in Friborg in the year 2000, the monographic exhibition of Peter Bosch and Simone Simons at the Tour du Pine in 2009, and the Mobility, Sounds and Forms exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 2010. Since September 2001 he has been a contributor for the contemporary music column of the Bloc Notes de la Mapra periodical, published by House of Plastic Arts Rhône-Alpes.

The artist Matt Coco is a graduate of L’École du Louvre in Paris and the Institute of Visual Arts in Orleans. She works in the fields of art-installations, drawing, video, sound-art, exploring issues lying at the crossroads of anthropology, architecture and literature.

This event is organised in cooperation with the French Institute in Russia