Since machines serve as our memory, we no longer need to know by heart. Therefore, far from the school exercise, this learning becomes a poetic act, of openness to others, as evidenced by the artist Violaine Lochu with “Mémoire Palace”. For this performance, she asked the inhabitants of Montreuil, in Île-de-France, to send her fragments learned by heart, to memorize them, say them, and become herself the living sound archive of a city.
SERIES BY HEART – THE SOUND THAT REMAINS wishes to stimulate reflection and create creations around the sound memories and oral cultures of the world. What words, poems, lullabies, slogans, songs… do we remember by heart? What sounds marked us, are we able to imitate orally? Seemingly unimportant, these fragments that we keep deep inside us and know how to recite, with our own voice, constitute living archives of what we retain, voluntarily or not, from our world as and above all from that of others.
Excerpt by heart from this episode: Performance ” Memory Palace by Violaine Lochu, created during an artist residency at 116-Centre d’art contemporain de Montreuil, in Ile-de-France.
What don’t you forget?
What remains of everything we hear, what don’t we forget? Monica Fantini wishes to multiply our perceptions and listenings of the world and to meet everyone. She collects and records texts, sounds, songs learned by heart from people of different languages, backgrounds and ages by evoking the context and the memories they bring to light… Assembled and intertwined, these fragments will compose also sound mosaics of the memories of the five continents within the framework of sound installations in Europe and Africa.
And you, what do you remember? If you wish to participate and meet Monica Fantini, you can write to this address: [email protected]
Listen to the world, everyone
Both a radio program broadcast every Sunday in the RFI news bulletin and a participatory platform, “Listen to the world” lets us hear the cultures, languages and imaginations of the world through sounds from Africa, America, Asia, Europe or Oceania. Hundreds of shows to listen to, while the participatory and scalable platform offers sound postcards and recordings. To date, 245 sound recordings are available for free access.