Paroles d’exil is a site-specific sound installation in three parts, co-created with Mélanie Egger for GMEM-CNCM.
Histoire. A poem, composed of archival voices from the Algerian war, is reinterpreted by dialoguing contemporary identities, virtually located in three loudspeakers. The fantasized, invented part of prior periods is voiced in the light of the present.
Mémoire. A machine learning algorithm generates new sequences of syllables from a corpus of archival voices, which are fragmented in location through several loudspeakers. Remembrance is imposed on us as a split, selective, hardly decipherable entity, in a constantly-evolving present.
Oubli. A soundscape, created from archival voice grains located in space, is recountable by the public as they move inside the room. Here, sounds do not carry semantic nor syntaxic information. Rather, they express the corporeality of people from the past, as a primal scream that echoes our collective memory.