Performance, approx. 15 minutes
Grand Théâtre de Genève, Saturday, February 1, 2025, 8 p.m.
Invited by Art Genève Musique, Biennale Son presents Le bruit de la langue, a performance by Camille Llobet, as part of WOLFTONE ASSOCIATES (or LES ASSOCIÉS DU SON LOUP), a new series of performances and musical installations at Geneva's Grand Théâtre.
This performance is an extension of an ongoing reflection on the meaning of the sound of oral language. When we speak, the words expressed sometimes have less meaning than the sound of the voice, which speeds up, slows down, reproduces the intonation of the speaker, stops abruptly, presses on a syllable or softens.
Headphones on, face to face, eyes closed, Camille Llobet and Magali Léger listen over and over again to a series of significant, extremely short extracts from one of their previously recorded conversations. Live, with their mouths, they reproduce the sounds of each other's words, in the manner of a child experimenting with the contours of the tongue. This fascination with noise is perhaps linked to the child's primitive experience. He discovers his environment by touching it, and reproduces the sound of his gestures with his mouth. He plays with the possibilities of his phonatory apparatus and the resonance of his voice in space. Little by little, mouth sounds are transformed into a series of syllables and become language.
Born in 1982 in Bonneville (FR)
Lives and works in Sallanches
Visual artist and director Camille Llobet is a graduate of the École supérieure d'art Annecy Alpes (2007). She has participated́ in the Salon de Montrouge in 2016 and in numerous group exhibitions such as Les Nouvelles Babylones (Centre d'art contemporain, Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2013), Silences (Musée d'art et d'histoire, Geneva, 2019), Oral Text (Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris, 2022) and L'Art d'apprendre. Une école des créateurs (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2022). She has had́ several solo exhibitions such as Second (Centre d'art de Vénissieux, 2014), Majelich (Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, 2018) Idiolecte (Galerie Florence Loewy, Paris, 2019). His works are part of French public collections including that of FRAC Sud, FRAC-Artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine, FRAC Grand Large - Hauts-de-France, Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes and Fond d'art contemporain - Paris Collection.
In 2023, Camille Llobet presents a first major monographic exhibition at the Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes entitled Fond d'air. She also finalizes a first medium-length documentary essay, Pacheû̂ (2023), selected́ at FID Marseille in French competition and first film competition. She is currently working on a new photographic, video and sound project entitled Moraine, which will be presented at the next edition of the Son Biennale in 2025 (Valais, Switzerland). She is also writing and directing a new feature-length documentary essay on high-mountain workers entitled Monstre pentes, produced by the Société des Apaches.
Each work begins with an encounter and a questioning process to be experimented with together. I begin by imagining precise filming devices that take the filmed experience as their starting point, and then create video and sound edits that are both intuitive and aim for formal radicalism. Drawings, scores and performances often follow on from the issues raised in the videos.
After exploring orality, movement and human perception as research territories during studio shoots, I moved́ my working protocols to the high mountains. This complex environment made up of rock, snow and ice is today undergoing mutation. A brutal transformation due to accelerating ice melt and rock collapses that places a geological time at the level of that of a human lifetime. This Pacheû (2020-2023) project has taken the form of sound installations and a first medium-length essay in which narration is achieved as much through noise and gesture as through voice and image. It opens up a new field of experimentation and formats by situating the human in an environment.
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Magali Léger, French soprano, trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and began a career acclaimed for her vocal and stage qualities, enriched by training in dance and theater. Unanimously awarded first prize and nominated at the Victoires de la Musique awards in 2003, she performs on prestigious stages in France and abroad, exploring a varied repertoire ranging from Baroque to contemporary.
She has collaborated with the likes of William Christie, Emmanuelle Haïm and Laurent Pelly, performing works by Offenbach, Mozart, Massenet and Bizet, as well as modern creations such as Michaël Levinas' La Métamorphose. She is also active in baroque music with her Rosasolis ensemble, having recorded several discs, and participates in eclectic projects such as Mars-2037, a musical comedy.