LIMBO & ALPSEGEN

16:20 – Introduction

Suitable for all who like to listen and watch extensively.

The event is partly held outdoors. In case of bad weather, please consult www.sonicmatter.ch about the latest news.

Strobe lights and fog machine will be used.

«LIMBO» (2022)
immersive installation for electronics, percussions, and voice

Marie Delprat – electronics
Stanislas Pili – percussion
Thomas Giger – light installation
Maxime Le Saux – sound
*Full credits below description

– Intermission –

«Ring» (2022)
immersive performance
World premiere

Antoine Läng – voice, speaker, megaphone
Olga Kokcharova – voice, speaker, megaphone, electronics
Jason Kahn – voice, speaker, megaphone, Schlagzeug
Anouck Genthon – voice, speaker, megaphone, Violine

Spaces are hybrid beings. Limbo, for example, that mythological place which unites heaven and hell, dissolves time and space because, there, no one knows where to go next and when: a space of possibility that «LIMBO» opens and shakes up in an audiovisual game of confusion. «Ring» offers the opposite by broadening spaces: for the closing of the festival, it sends people off with its very own form of an alpine benediction – the traditional call of the alpine farmer, which expands with the mountain echo and protects all beings it reaches.

Marie Delprat, Thomas Giger, Stanislas Pili & Maxime Le Saux: «LIMBO» (2022)

immersive installation for electronics, percussion and voice

«Sich in einem Zustand extremen Bebens wiederzufinden,
[To find oneself in a state of extreme tremor]
erhellt durch die Unwirklichkeit,
[illuminated by unrealness]
um in einer Ecke seines selbst Teile der realen Welt zu entdecken.
[to discover parts of the real world in a corner of oneself.]»
– Antonin Artaud, «Der Nabel des Niemandslands»

In Dante's «Divine Comedy», limbo is an indefinite place where those souls must endure who have not sinned but cannot enter paradise because they have never been baptised. More generally speaking, limbo means an uncertain, undecided state. With «LIMBO», the artist collective around Marie Delprat takes up the challenge of addressing the topic of the unrepresentable: The representation of an imaginary space, a mythical and unreal place - a limbo.
The work is based on the stage as a «heterotopia»: a concept of the philosopher Michel Foucault, according to which there are places that can contain several places that are actually incompatible with each other. The immersive sound installation «LIMBO» shapes the stage space in this sense and occupies it by constantly ascribing new values and interpretations to it, enabling it to exist in different ways. In the process, a space is created that fully involves the audience. Immersion in this very own universe makes it possible to experience the spatiality and materialisation of sound.
The installation thus aims to make limbo, which actually only exists in its religious or figurative sense, tangible. To this end, it makes use of the entire metaphorical power inherent in the concept of limbo and its connotations. This place, which is detached from all ordinary temporality and spatiality, through the installation becomes a space in which sounds and images first open up all the possibilities of the imagination to the audience.

* Full credit «Limbo»: concept & music – Marie Delprat, music – Stanislas Pili, scenography & light design – Thomas Giger, sound design – Maxime Le Saux, voice – Tobias Krüger, dramaturgy – Emmanuelle Delprat, outside eye – Yanna Rüger, production – Maxine Devaud / oh la la – performing arts production, coproduction – Dampfzentrale Bern, support – Pro Helvetia, Pourcent culturel Migros, Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Burgergemeinde Bern, Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung SIS, Gesellschaft zu Schuhmachern

Anouck Genthon, Jason Kahn, Olga Kokcharova & Antoine Läng: «Ring» (2022)

immersive performance
World premiere

«RING» refers to the Eastern Swiss centuries-old tradition of the «Betruf», or «Alpsegen», a daily ritual in the form of a prayer shepherds from alpine areas sing to the mountain in summer. This blessing provides protection to the area and to the living and non-living creatures covered by the sound. The shape of a given territory, or «ring», appears from the extent covered by the propagation of sound, helped by the acoustic features of the mountain, its echoes and reverberations.
As a performance exploring ways acoustic sound actions can weave specific relations with an environment, «RING» displaces some elements of the ancient Alpine ritual in the urban architectural context of Walcheturm and Zeughausareal courtyard. Megaphones and portable loud speakers replace the traditional funnels to amplify voices, environmental or electronic sounds, on the edge of acoustics and electro-acoustics.
«RING» still addresses the site, in this context in order to hear an acoustic response, how instrumental and local sounds can blend to become hybrid territories, and form new sound topographies and become music. The audience is invited to walk in, to move or simply stay on the site, let their attention host sound events as matters of composition.