Boudreau | Rodríguez | Labelle | Point d’ouïe #4
” POINT D’OUÏE #4 ” : immersive sound program
Artists: Léa Boudreau, Simon Labelle, Martín Rodríguez
Curator: Mathieu Arsenault
There are many ways to experience a place, each layer of perception offering a distinct way of seeing or listening. Some layers leave a mark on our senses, others pass through unnoticed, while some exist only in our imagination, like subtle synaptic micro-impulses.
Each artist at Point d’ouïe 4 engages with the elusive nature of places, striving to magnify their imperceptible qualities or reveal what lies hidden. Martín Rodríguez, for example, explores sites by setting up intricate networks for transmitting and receiving radio waves. Straddling the line between performance and installation, he creates electromagnetic structures that weave unseen connections between objects and the people who inhabit the space. Léa Boudreau, in turn, works at the microscopic level and at the edge of perception, crafting miniature robots that she deploys throughout the space. Her multidisciplinary approach, blending DIY electronics, performance, and sound art, delves into the potential of the non-human to activate and transform a place. Finally, musician and sound artist Simon Labelle surveys locations to draw out their emotional resonances. By reshaping recordings made in places dear to him, he charts an emotional map of space rooted in feelings, memories, and nostalgia.
For the Point d’ouïe 4 event, the three artists will gather at Sporobole around a custom-designed 16-speaker setup created specifically for the occasion. In this extraordinary listening environment, both artists and audience will have the opportunity to hear the space anew, uncovering imaginary places with unexpected potential.
Mathieu Arsenault, Curator.
Learn more about the works :
Léa Boudreau
un lieu avec qui bruire || a place to noise with
un lieu avec qui bruire || a place to noise with is a performance inspired by an installation of the same name that views the place as a more-than-human entity and interacts with it. Seen as more than the sum of its parts, the more-than-human character attributed to the place evokes its vitality, uniqueness, and agency. The performance delves into the often imperceptible or overlooked noisy details of the space (in this case, Sporobole’s presentation hall) through custom-made electronic devices used as sensory intermediaries. These devices make the subtle aspects of the place audible to a human audience, drawing attention to its ever-changing nature and highlighting the multitude of entities (living or non-living) that make up the space. Among other things, the work reveals the textures emerging from electromagnetic fields, the resonant potential of various materials, and amplifies background noises. The audience is invited to reflect on human sensory limitations and how they shape our interactions with the world, while also considering their own role, however temporary, in the noisy landscape of the presentation space.
Martin Rodriguez
Migration as Territory
To be Chicanx, to be Mestizx is to exist in the margins, to not be from here nor there, to be from a non-place. A definition only realized in the in-between, a space materialized through friction, a monstrous outcome born of interdependence. One can only reclaim place through process.
By transmitting archival soundscape files all on the same frequency this performance embodies this fraught marginal space. Manipulating the distance of the transmitters to accompanying radios displaces the sound from one radio to another. Each movement and small gesture affects the broadcast, revealing the awareness to the in-between, the radio acting as a vector for entangling transmissions.
Simon Labelle
Family Vacation 1993
Simon Labelle samples sounds from various YouTube videos. For his performance, he works from the search channel “Family vacation 1993”, whose results lead to the digitization of entire collections of family memories with a limited number of views. In this way, the artist plunders the memories of others under the cover of the algorithm – an act that leaves him feeling both nostalgic and voyeuristic.