Lauren Tortil

Listening Bar

performance by Lauren Tortil

Saturday, August 30, 2025 at Grenette de la Ferme-Asile, Sion

Free, on reservation

Maximum 8 people per session

Listening Bar is inspired by the eponymously-named Japanese audiophile bars that the artist discovered during his visits to Japan in 2023 and 2024: intimate bars dedicated to listening to music. With a confined space, subdued lighting, a turntable, vinyl records and high-quality speakers, the artist dons a barmaid's apron for this performance and invites you to enjoy a cocktail, in silence, to the rhythm of her musical selection.

In connection with the exhibition devoted to the work of Catherine Ceresole at La Grenette, this selection takes as its starting point the no wave and punk scene of 1980s New York. While silence here contributes fully to concentration, the listening experience proposed is meant to be both active and shared: the presence of the audience and the gestures of the barmaid overlap with the records being played, drawing attention simultaneously to the music and the sounds produced in the space. These simultaneous events seem to participate in the creation of a new composition, improvised in real time within the space.

This work was co-produced by the Son Biennale and the Villa du Parc art center in Annemasse, France. This project is presented as part of Villa Kujoyama's post-residency program, with the support of the Institut français, the Institut français du Japon and the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller.

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Please Listen to This

Ambulatory performance by EDHEA students
Ville de Sion, Friday, October 24, 2025

Please Listen to This is a performance project staging a collective sound orchestration in public and urban spaces. This so-called mediated orchestration is deployed in the space with the help of some fifteen performers and the public, equipped with audio headphones, who both receive real-time instructions recorded via an application on their smartphones. Through a process of transmission, this performance proposes to federate a group of people by means of headphones - a technology initially for individual use that favors withdrawal - in order to offer them a sensitive experience based on heightened attention to their environment.

This project is presented as part of Villa Kujoyama's post-residency program, with the support of the Institut français, the Institut français du Japon and the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. It was also supported by the Institut Français du Kansai, the Fondation des artistes and Eur CAPS. The digital application was specially developed by Télécom Paris with the help of Dominique Blouin, Rizwan Parveen, Jean-Sébastien Gomez and their students.

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Lauren Tortil

Born in 1986
Based in Paris

Lauren Tortil is a sound artist and doctoral student at Eur CAPS in Rennes. Influenced by sound studies and media archaeology, she is interested in listening processes through the prism of sound technologies and the environments they generate. Her approach - which also incorporates a visual and sculptural component - is reflected in the iconographic and theoretical research that feeds her protean plastic practice: performances, installations, printed objects... He is the author of the book Une généalogie des grandes oreilles, Tombolo Presses, 2019. Her work is regularly shown in France, including at the FRAC Ile-de-France, Bétonsalon, Centre Pompidou, Pernod Ricard and Louis Vuitton Foundations, ADAGP, Villa du Parc in Annemasse; and abroad at the Musée d'art de Joliette, Canada; the Igloo Sound Gallery in Jihlava; the 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial... In 2024, she was awarded the Villa Kujoyama with the support of the French Institute, the French Institute of Japan and the Bettencourt Schueller Foundation.