Interview

Thierry Davila - Pascal Broccolichi

Thierry Davila: Deserts occupy an important place in your life. You spend a lot of time crossing them, and recording the sounds that emanate from them. To me, your activity seems more and more like an enterprise of "desert invention". Could you explain why such places are physically and "auditorily" so significant for you, and how they link up with your work ?

Pascal Broccolichi : Preparing to enter a desert, working out the preliminaries – that's the kind of thing you can generally do with disconcerting ease. It's later, I think, in this kind of environment without any internal features, that you have to implement what might be called a route map, and build up a framework of investigation that's independent of any geographical approach – which is undoubtedly the most complex possible task, because you have to accept that the desert is its own transition space. In this kind of territory, everything's caught up in an intermediate time frame. Its outer boundaries are its only reference points; but they also give you abrupt notice, at a certain point, that your journey's at an end.
The desert's first of all an area that welds the body to movement. It then sets in motion a process of "incorporation", in which the unity of time and place is constantly called into question. And before lending itself to the work of invention that you mentioned, it's an environment without land – and that's always an incentive to set down markers. The only bearings I can imagine being relevant to this kind of environment are "active listening and vision": samples of auditory fragments; data that will afterwards serve as points on a sort of memory schema.
Apart from that, it has to be accepted that there's always a remarkably tentative apprehension. I wouldn't be able to describe it, but I'd certainly say it's situated well beyond what the most crushing boredom can usually produce. At this stage, the journey time deploys itself in such a broad relationship with the horizon that your reference points may end up in a state of contradiction.
For me, inventing the desert always means making sure that one of two values (the unity of place, and that of time) is not cancelled out in favour of the other.
The question remains: how can you make reliable observations, given that this superficial expanse has no polarity, no tangible depth; and that no high ground exists from which to look round ?
I think that at this point memory's the only form of mental projection – memory to be used in constructing a derivation environment that'll help me to imagine what I call the background. It's true that when I spend time crossing a desert, everything else gets put off till later.

TD : So it's in the desert that you discover – or rediscover – memory, which is one of the main things you use in your work ? And is memory conceived of, explored and used as a means of survival, in both cases ?

PB : In order to answer your question, I'll have to make a long detour. In November 2002 we were planning a journey of around four thousand kilometres, from the territory of the Peuls to the north of the Tenere, on the Libyan border, taking with us all the equipment we needed for the topographical survey work we'd started some years earlier, in other desert regions. Here again, in this exercise of data collection, my only objective was to mark out and methodically stabilise our progress. It was a sort of sampling procedure based on a grid principle and a scale of selection. The intervals between reference points were pre-ordained in a sort of restrained, unhurried notation. And each itinerary could be only a transitory stage on the way to a choice of probable orientations.
Once again, the experience of this expedition, and the subsequent work, allowed me to see that these reference points, taken in places where no bearings existed, were simply useful in neutralising a certain number of phenomena that propagate even where they seem to appear out of nowhere.
In fact, most of these incongruous traces are imperceptible on the ground. They show up only gradually, as a result of lengthy analyses. And you can only do the analyses when you're back in the studio, far from the initial context.
The working environment takes something like the form of an atlas that retraces all the steps in the propagation of the phenomena encountered. Vanishing lines, rhythms and variations in density that progress over time give rise to operations of textural deformation, to the point of saturation. It's a new terrain in movement, which invents and modulates its own figures – a transduction site where listening and looking can carry out their work of projection. You probably realise that for me this phase, which gives the viewer an arrow of interpretation, is particularly important and delicate. If I pay so much attention to the topography, it's because, paradoxically, the atlas that I'm progressively putting together also entails a process of de-territorialisation.
And this leads from the surface towards spaces in perpetual re-definition. It provides non-linear pathways in which situations lead into one another, whereas interpretation includes every imaginable context.
For me the particular "auditory expedition" in question was one of the most enigmatic fields of investigation I've experienced. It was also the real point of departure for an important work, since, as you're well aware, this was when our project for the exhibition at capcMusée really took off.
I always use the same method: antenna-receivers, a parabolic mike and a camera for recording and photographing each zone at regular, determinate time intervals that depend on the size of the region.
Having traversed certain parts of the world, and attempted to measure them, I've noticed that these territories aren't the silent zones we generally imagine. Nor are they conventional landscapes of sound. The auditory trace is so unexpected that the duration of the listening always seems uninterrupted, as though condensed into a permanent state of attention. Sound seems to exist there only as a result of our presence. Everything takes place in the interior, as if in a zone of infinite thrust.
It's perhaps this strong impression, this effect of acoustic displacement, that triggers what's called a survivalist reaction.

TD : In relation to the capc project and the architectural space it represents, how have you articulated your knowledge of deserts onto your auditory and volumetric approach to the Lainé warehouse ?
Do you see something like a desert there ?

PB : I don't see the desert as a subject of work. The most it can do is to draw attention, at a given time, to a set of contextual pathways. So between the desert and capc, I don't see any inherent link, except for some effects of undulatory resonance such as you can find in any sort of environment.
But since the complex surfaces of these apparently empty regions gave me access to fantastic worlds of experience, I thought that the structure of the building, seen as a network of possible itineraries, might allow me to establish resonances between a certain number of phenomena similar to those I observed during my journeys. I think the project for the sound installation Dial-O-Map 25° really started with a simple observation. When you arrive in capc's exhibition space through the main entrance, there's a powerful horizontal line, immediate and extremely dense, that you perceive as a deep substructure.
This enigmatic, unfathomable presence is due to the powerful vertical pull of the central pillers and arches. In a huge empty volume of more than twenty-seven thousand cubic metres, these two lines of tension, on their own, combine geographical depth with the propagation time of the sound waves. And in the particular spatial context, sounds appear to separate out from their source just as quickly as they go off, deferred, along different pathways.
There's one point that I think is essential – the work has to take into account both the configuration of the volume and the precise task of auditory acquisition that I generally carry out when I'm aiming to extend a field of exploration.
So to begin with, I imagined dividing up this volume of air in a precise way, and mapping its acoustic itineraries. Using digital methods for handling structure and 3-D spatialisation, I rigorously traced out the zone that was to be occupied by the definitive form of the installation.
Then came two years of preparatory work. I used ultra-low-frequency antenna-receivers and seismic sensors to make a complete inventory of disturbances in the electrical grid and vibratory movements in the different parts of the building. During this period of investigation (which you yourself followed, of course), all my observations led me to believe there'd be a listening period that would allow the work to be conceptualised, like a laboratory created piece by piece for this exhibition space. More than an acoustic study of the building, an inventory of the vectors that propagated all the "residual sounds" was what helped me to gradually pin down the matrix of a large number of listening pathways. After carrying out auditory work in a desert region somewhere on the face of the planet, I always use the same filtering method to bring out the trajectories of resonance, from their points of transmission to the receptive layers of the structure.
This "experimental theatre" gradually revealed a large collection of sophisticated immersive frequences, rhythmic internal formulae, repetitive stases. Such material would be inaudible to the human ear without using a technique of introspection and sound capture.
So far, the atlas of the exhibition space has unveiled a panorama of stratifications, zone by zone, without any limits of perspective. The various diffuse vibratory phenomena combine and intersect, from the foundations of the edifice to the loudspeakers in the setup, and the entire building plays the acoustic role of a wave bridge for the listener. It operates as a sort of overall energy, like an amplifier establishing a relationship of interpenetration with the flows of electromagnetic activity.