Mélia Roger

Installation

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Tendre Phonocène is rooted in the industrial forests around my home (Rhône). Inspired by recent scientific studies of acoustic enrichment, which have shown that sound can be used to help repair damaged environments, I set out to adopt this method by inviting sound recordists to play recordings in forest plantations and in clearings.  The sounds we played had been recorded on-site over several years, collected in bits of forest that have since been cut down, or in unlogged areas. Here, without scientific pretension but as a poetic act of acoustic care, we play those sounds back in what is a kind of reactivation of a past soundscape. Like a distant memory of extinct species, might these sounds perhaps have a positive impact on these places? The term “Phonocene” is taken directly from Donna Haraway, and used by Vinciane Despret to propose the philosophical concept of an era when attention is paid to the sounds of the earth. How do we listen to these remaining voices? What do we take in when we take in sound? How do we give these voices back? The installation Tendre Phonocène documents this research.

Mélia Roger

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Mélia Roger (\*1996, she/her) is a field recordist and artist committed to inspiring ecological change with environmental and empathic listening. Her work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, searching for the invisible layers between human and non-human. Coming from a sound engineering background (ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris, ZHdK in Zurich), Mélia divides her time between immersive 7.0.2 sound recordings within HAL and a more experimental and naturalistic approach to listening. She is working at Le Fresnoy a practice-based PhD candidate from the University of Lille, focusing on the relations between sound arts and acoustic ecology.

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