For the fifth evening of performance cycle Fermons les yeux pour voir. Always mind your surroundings, the artists Anne-F Jacques and Philippe Battikha invite the public to pay attention to its immediate sound environment. Ottawa street becomes an intimate reflective space, akin to a listening room, where everyone is invited to move around and hearken to both the sound subtleties of ephemeral installations and the echoed poundings of the surrounding construction sites.
Anne-F Jacques
At the East end of Ottawa street, Anne-F Jacques deploys, assembles and amplifies an ephemeral ensemble of precarious kinetic constructions. The assembly of moving objects - not very spectacular with its low-volume sound textures - encourages the public to move around, bend over, listen and ultimately look for new points of view. With this intervention, Anne-F Jacques simultaneously disrupts and merges the surrounding physical and aural spaces, in an indirect interaction with the area and the intervention of Philippe Battikha.
Anne-F Jacques is a sound artist based in Montreal. She is interested in light technologies, basic objects and rough sounds. She currently has several collaboration projects, including ones with Ryoko Akama, Tim Olive and Julie Doucet. Her sound installations and performances are presented here and there, in festivals, in parks and even under staircases. She recently published with le laps in Montreal Roches rencontrées.
Philippe Battikha
In a short essay titled Counter-Eavesdropping, Michal Libera describes as "counter-eavesdropping" his early memories of hearing his parents arguing while they thought he was sleeping : “The sonic presence of the others was unintentional, involuntary, anxious, fascinating, secret, perverse, and in the end desired; desired as listening, yet unwanted as hearing. Unwanted by me, and unwanted by my parents. I did not want to hear and they did not want to be heard.” At Place Publique, Philippe Battikha extends the notion of counter-eavesdropping to the unintentional, involuntary, anxious, fascinating, and unwanted sounds that accompany the architectural changes that envelop the Darling Foundry. The interjection of field recordings taken in surrounding sites progressively interrupt the delicate sounds presented by Anne-F Jacques’ sculptural works.
At the heart of Philippe Battikha's practice lies an obsession with sound. Following in a tradition of sound-artists and composers such as Max Neuhaus and R. Murray Schafer, his work centers around the belief that in today’s visually driven society we must pay closer attention to the impact and importance of aural environments in our lives. By recontextualizing familiar sounds and exposing specific aural properties in sound installations, sculptures, and controlled sound environments, Philippe Battikha explores the relationships we have to the sounds that surround us, and their effect on our experiences. Based in Montreal, he intervened a few times at the Darling Foundry in 2018. He created Fire in the Foundry as part of the exhibition Maureen III and participated to Ottawall Odwalla as part of the performance cycle Fermons les yeux pour voir. Always mind your surroundings.
Starting at 6 PM, join us and enjoy the Second Nature Bar of the Darling Foundry and the tacos stand by Café Cantina, on a set by DJ Xarah Dion!
