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Radio and its airwaves are exposed at the Swiss border.
Nestled in Bourogne, not far from Belfort, a few kilometres from the Swiss border, the Espace multimédia Gantner, EMG to its friends, is a place of discovery, experimentation and research. The current exhibition celebrates radio as a source of inspiration.
The Gantner Centre is well known to today's artists. It welcomes them in residence, it exhibits them. On display now and until the end of November is an exhibition with the dreamy and mysterious title "Giving form to the ether", curated by the sound artist and composer Pali Meursault, producer of performances and radio pieces.
Working with radio forms
"Giving form to the ether". What is it about? A tribute to radio, its history, its uses and the presence of the airwaves in our lives. In the century of its existence," explains the presentation document, " radio has gone from being a technological and cultural revolution to a domestic convenience and even an almost obsolete communication instrument. The radio set: a familiar, common, sometimes vintage object, increasingly dematerialised - radio is becoming digital - behind which the mystery of radiation unfolds. It is this invisible, this electromagnetic ether that the exhibition curated by Pali Meursault is interested in. He has brought together a dozen artists for whom radio is not only a vector of sound production, but an object of artistic exploration, where physics is never far away. How do they appropriate radio in all its components: waves, transmitters, receivers? Behind the technical terms, poetry.
Parabolas and cosmic waves
Dinah Bird, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Julien Clauss, Joyce Hinterding, Kaori Kinoshita, Alain della Negra, Nicolas Montgermont and the ∏Node collective take up radiation as a creative material in its own right, undertake to explore waves, which are essentially invisible, and take on the challenge of revealing and sculpting them. Nicolas Montgermont's "Axis Mundi" is an ambitious installation - with a large rotating parabola in the centre of the room - that thinks of radio on the scale of... the cosmos! The artist uses a very specific property of radio waves: the fact that they travel at the speed of light (300 000 km per second). Enough to tickle the imagination...
A collective installation is also presented: "On: Transmission:", created by a dozen researchers in acoustics and sound artists, including the German Christina Kubisch, one of the pioneers in this field. A great group!
Guided tour of the exhibition :
The Gantner multimedia space is thus transformed, for the duration of the exhibition, into a perpetual radio show.
Until 27 November 2021.
Suzanne Gervais
