AURÉLIA NOUDELMANN

During the residency, Aurélia Noudelmann proposed a sound installation in dialogue with the biodiversity of the domain. The urgent need to recompose our listening and exchange systems with our environment guided her research towards an interactive installation, the main actors of which are plant bodies. Through a program made on Arduino, the vibrations of their roots were translated into MIDI notes, generating a spatially variable sound composition. The installation thus proposed a soundscape based on different dialectics, opposed and intertwined: interior-exterior, nature-technology, translation-communication, understanding-listening …. The installation sought to question the boundaries of speciesism and the culture of anthropocentrism.

The device invited individuals to think of our lives beyond the gaze, to place biodiversity at the heart of our relationship with the environment. This experiment focused on soliciting affinities that are little recognized in our daily lives: offering a plural listening to the various exchanges generated by plant bodies. Our modes of communication being centered on language, we forget those that the actors of a plant space use, through vibrations, in order to survive in an environment. This underground world holds a complex wealth, made up of an infinite number of networks. Through her research, Aurélia wanted to open up a field of possibilities: not a uniform voice, but a multitude of variable sound interpretations.

During the residency at Domaine de Boisbuchet, she carried out an analysis of the different vibrations exerted by the roots of the plants and trees of the estate: she measured their intensity in order to regulate the rates of variations which were subsequently transformed into sounds, modulated by the Arduino program. The device lasted nearly nine hours, where individuals could lie down along a bamboo bed and hay cushions. The development and choice of the instruments of the composition were thought out in close relation to the space and duration of the installation: in correspondence with the multitude of rhythms generated by the signals from the roots. This approach continued in the same way for the choice of materials used: bamboo is an eminently acoustic material – which generated a whistle design collaboration with another resident, Margaus Ballagny – and hay, which is able to disintegrate into nature, yet is still durable.

After a master’s degree in aesthetics on rhythms in Paris, Aurélia Noudelmann studied in the experimental design department (DesignLab) at the Gerrit Rietveld Académie.