Mélia Roger

Installation

What is there left to hear after a fire?

Equipped with a hand-held listening device, like a stethoscope, visitors auscultate a shattered giant shell containing all the aural memories of a forest after the fire.

The sculpture is conceived as a speculative cartography, immersing us in the auditory sensations of a walk through a burned forest. We hear the sounds of ants slowly recolonising the floor, digging their tunnels, bats doing slow-motion echolocation, boar crossing a river that is coming back to life, the voices of ecologists counting the birds and a sound recordist seeking out what remains to be heard.

Made using a decollate snail shell that is cracked all over because of the summer fires that broke out in the Aude (southwest France) in the summer of 2025, the sculpture contains field recordings made during explorations carried out through the seasons. This sound material combines with data from the Sonosylva research programme at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris, for which two automatic recording devices measure the health of environments by the sounds they contain. This sound material is incorporated into the very structure of the sculpture, and can be heard by placing the listening device a few centimetres from the shell.

Mélia Roger

Découvrir le profil

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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