« Earth Ears : écouter la Terre avec Pauline Oliveros » Exhibition at Aperto

Project Space of the Pernod Ricard Foundation, Aperto is a space for contemporary creation in the making. This new venue for the Foundation's programming is designed to accommodate projects of variable geometry - exhibitions, research, performances, workshops, meetings, editions - evolving according to the artistic and collaborative practices that inhabit it.

Bétonsalon - center d'art et de recherche, opens the premises with the exhibition "Earth Ears: écouter la Terre avec Pauline Oliveros", a project conceived as an echo and extension of the exhibition it is devoting to the composer, a founding figure in the practice of Deep Listening.

Echoing the exhibition "Un-Tuning Together: pratiquer l'écoute avec Pauline Oliveros" held at Bétonsalon, this project explores the links between Deep Listening and ecology through a selection of archives and works by Oliveros, pioneer of electronic music, accordionist, educator and feminist composer.

According to her, "Deep Listening is about listening to everything that is possible to hear in every possible way... This intense listening includes the sounds of everyday life, those of nature, of our own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is a heightened state of consciousness that connects the listener to all that exists." (1) This definition immediately underscores the place of the living in Oliveros' work - "My childhood in rural Texas sensitized me to the sounds of natural elements and animal life," she has repeatedly explained - but also and above all her conception of listening as a practice capable of making us aware of what connects us to the world.

As musicologist Denise Von Glahn writes, "Oliveros takes a holistic view of the world, and thus conceives of nature differently from many of the writers, thinkers and composers who have gone before her. Far from seeing nature as something discrete and external to itself, something separate from humanity, Oliveros sees herself as part of a living continuum." (2)

Organized into five chapters, this exhibition looks at the different ways in which, in Oliveros' work, the practice of listening can make us feel this continuity with the living world. Here, sensitive experience is part of a political project: that of breaking with an anthropocentric vision of nature by experiencing the environment no longer as a noisy background, a setting for human activities, but as an active entity to which we are deeply linked.

Following on from their proposals for the exhibition at Bétonsalon, Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos and Martha Salimbeni have joined forces to create a consultation space inspired by library systems based on flexible load-bearing structures. Illuminated by a soft light associated with somnolence, these memories are to be reactivated by reading, listening, interpreting and daydreaming.

(1) Pauline Oliveros, « Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (to Practice Practice) », in Sounding the Margins, Collected Writings 1992-2009, Deep Listening Publications, 2010, p. 73.

(2) Denise Von Glahn, Music and the Skillfull listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, Indiana University Press, 2013, p. 106.

Photo : Exhibition view Aperto © Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos