Soundwalk Collective

INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE, 2025

Three installations created for the 2nd edition of Biennale Son

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INVISIBLE LANDSCAPE

feat. Anika, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jim Jarmusch, Nan Goldin, Natalia Lafourcade, Willem Dafoe
Audio - 4 channels, triptych takeoff, LED, luminous tubes, quartz, analog clocks
Hard. 221'42"

La Centrale control room

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Invisible Landscape is a sound installation imagined for the great hall and control room of the Chandoline power plant - a former hydroelectric cathedral now disused. Conceived as a journey through vanished or vanishing landscapes, the project takes the listener from one extreme to another: from the glaciers of Greenland, recorded by Stephan Crasneanscki in the summer of 2024, to the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth. Melting ice becomes sound matter, amplified by the spectral feedback of Jim Jarmusch's guitar, which echoes the disappearance of glaciers around the world, before giving way to the sounds of the desert, where the voices of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nan Goldin and Willem Dafoe recite the indexes of Rachel Carson, pioneer of ecology, transforming the scientific inventory into an elegy.

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Further on, Natalia Lafourcade's voice and song of mourning invoke the memory and wisdom of indigenous cultures, while Anika Henderson weaves, through the words of T. S. Eliot, a poetic resistance to the disappearance of the living.

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A visual dimension accompanies the sound composition, developed by Stephan Crasneanscki: a glass triptych entitled Décollage presents partially erased images of Valais glaciers now gone, giving way to new landscapes. In the center of the space, a raw glass sculpture evokes the melting of glaciers. Two original clocks from the control room, modified to disrupt the linearity of time, evoke the "tipping point" theory.

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Between industrial resonances, natural materials, embodied voices and visual imprints, Invisible Landscape explores the absence, memory and fragility of ecosystems, inviting us to listen to - and see - what the world is losing and what it still has left to pass on.



Artistic direction: Stephan Crasneanscki
Arrangements and production: Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, Sofia Sanseverino
Field recordings in Greenland / Granular synthesis: Stephan Crasneanscki
Additional field recordings in Greenland: Carlota Marques
Modular synthesis, particle sound: Simone Merli, Benjamin Flesser
Texts: Rachel Carson, T.S. Eliot, Stephan Crasneanscki Mixing: Lorenzi

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WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 12,2012, 2025

Audio - 3 channels
Texts on picture windows

Hall de La centrale
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In the main exhibition space, this sound work unfolds in the form of brief interventions lasting around one minute, broadcast every ten minutes. Designed to coexist with other sound pieces in the hall, this series acts as a discreet but persistent interruption - a watery breath disrupting the general flow.

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Composed from recordings made by Stephan Crasneanscki at the Mauvoisin dam, around an hour south of Sion, the piece establishes a direct link with the Chandoline power station, once powered by water from the same dam. The power station ceased operations on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, the date to which the work refers.

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On the power station's large picture windows, Crasneanscki has also installed a visual work composed of indexes extracted from the works of Rachel Carson - marine biologist and pioneering figure of modern ecology, best known for her book Silent Spring (1962). The selected words, centred around the themes of water and melting glaciers, were printed upside down and inside out on the glass, so that sunlight projected them onto the floor of the exhibition space. Depending on the time of day and the intensity of the light, these words appear more or less clearly - ghostly traces of knowledge, of a natural world on the verge of extinction.

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Sound recording on the Grande Dixence dam, Switzerland & music processing: Stephan Crasneanscki
Mixing: Lorenzi Setti Texts: Rachel Carson
Graphic design: Romain Iannone
Typography: François Rappo

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TUESDAY, SEPT. 13 2022 ROLLE, 2025

Opération Béton by Jean-Luc Godard, 16 mm film (transferred to digital format), 1954
Original soundtrack by Soundwalk Collective, 2-channel audio, 19 minutes
Creation for the Biennale Son
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La Centrale reception room

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Made in 1954 on the Grande Dixence construction site, Opération Béton is Jean-Luc Godard's first film, in which irony and critical thought are already sketched out. For the Biennale Son, the Soundwalk Collective is offering a re-reading of the film: a full-length screening of the film, enhanced by a previously unseen mix of Godard's voice and sound material from his archives.

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In 2014, Stephan Crasneanscki was granted exceptional access to this intimate space, a veritable sanctuary gathering all his belongings: film reels, books, research documents, editing desk, handwritten notes, sketches, photographs and recordings. Among these treasures were tapes of on-set sound recordings - most of which were never used in the final edits. From these, Crasneanscki extracted fragments of Godard conducting musical rehearsals and formulating sound ideas for his films. These hitherto unpublished archives provide the material for a new soundscape, a tribute to the acoustic dimension of his work.

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The screening is followed by a sound piece by Stephan Crasneanscki, recorded on the shores of Lake Geneva in Rolle on the day Jean-Luc Godard died, September 13, 2022.

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Between industrial power and intimate breath, the installation sets two temporalities in tension - that of the young Godard faced with progress and that of his last hours on the shores of Lake Geneva - to question memory, modernity and the sonic traces of existence.

Art direction and field recordings on Lake Geneva: Stephan Crasneanscki
Film: Jean-Luc Godard
Arrangements and production: Simone Merli, Sofia Sanseverino
Mixing: Lorenzi Setti

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Soundwalk Collective

Composed of contemporary artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli, Soundwalk Collective integrate sound, film, and mixed-media in site- and context-specific artwork.

Evolving along multi-disciplinary lines, Soundwalk Collective has cultivated long-term creative collaborations with artist and writer Patti Smith, late director Jean-Luc Goddard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Waltz, film dircetor and musician Jim Jarmusch, and actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others.

Central to their artistic philosophy is the exploration of sound as a medium to navigate and interpret the complexities of human experience and the environment. In doing so, their practice engages in the narrative potential of sound across mediums such as art installations, dance, music and film.

Their soundtrack for All The Beauty and the Bloodshed (directed by Laura Poitras) won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Festival, and was performed live at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2024, Soundwalk Collective presented and performed a three-day program, Correspondences, with Patti Smith at the Venice Festival, at the invitation of the Fondation Cartier.

Soundwalk Collective have performed and exhibited at institutions, festivals and fairs including Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), CCB (Lisbon), Centre Pompidou (Paris), documenta (Kassel), FRIEZE (New York), kurimanzutto (New York), Manifesta (Palermo), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo), MOT Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin (Medellin), Onassis Stegi (Athens), Piknic (Seoul), Volksbühne (Berlin).