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Radio and its airwaves are exposed at the Swiss border.
Nestled in Bourogne, not far from Belfort and a few kilometers from the Swiss border, the Espace Multimédia Gantner, or EMG to its friends, is a place of discovery, experimentation and research. The current exhibition celebrates radio as a source of inspiration.
The Gantner Center is well known to today's artists. It welcomes them for residencies, it exhibits them. On view now until the end of November is an exhibition with the dreamlike, mysterious title "Donner forme à l'éther", curated by sound artist and composer Pali Meursault, producer of performances and radio pieces.
Working with radio forms
"Giving shape to the ether". What's it all 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 instrument of communication." The radio set: a familiar, common, sometimes vintage object, increasingly dematerialized - radio is becoming digital - behind which the mystery of radiation unfolds. The exhibition curated by Pali Meursault focuses on this invisible, electromagnetic ether. He has brought together a dozen artists for whom radio is not just a vehicle for sound production, but an object of artistic exploration, where physics is never far away. How do they appropriate radio in all its constituent parts: 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, exploring waves that are essentially invisible, and taking up the challenge of revealing and sculpting them. Nicolas Montgermont's "Axis Mundi" is an ambitious installation - with a large rotating parabola in the center of the room - that considers 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 acoustics researchers and sound artists, including German Christina Kubisch, one of the pioneers in this field. A great bunch!
Guided tour of the exhibition :
For the duration of the exhibition, the Espace Multimédia Gantner will be transformed into a perpetual radio show.
Until November 27, 2021.
Suzanne Gervais
