Spiral 2

Atelier de la gare, Locminé, residency and exhibition, 2014.

330 X 422 X 225 cm. Wood, painted steel plates, industrial paint. Sound loop 35 minutes.

 

Spiral 2 is a monumental sculpture that is part of a set with Spiral 1. These two sculptures are inspired by megalithic sites explored on the Landes de Lanvaux sites during the residency at L'atelier de la Gare in Locminé.

The sculpture presents a sloping floor, surrounded by walls inclined sometimes outwards, sometimes inwards. Its shape evokes the spiral of the inner ear whose spiral winding allows the reception of specific sound frequencies.

Very quickly after the entrance corridor, the floor widens. It is then composed of several concentric plates which evoke a diaphragm or an eardrum.
The sound broadcast under the central plate was recorded in the dolmens visited, mixed with the sounds of the knocking of steel plates, falling stones and pore water.

The central plate is the keystone, both structural and metaphorical, of the sculpture: not only does it "hold" everything else through a play of reciprocal tensions, but it attracts the experimenters who place themselves in a listening position, the looking down at this ground with its subtle vibrations. The sculpture inverts the sky-earth relationship usual for human constructions: the earth is more than a support, it is the focal point, the opportunity for both interior and exterior listening.
Spiral 2 is like an enlarged portion of Spiral 1, an extension of the same convoluted path. It continues the sensory transformation initiated by Spiral 1: to the awareness of the invisible is added the sensation of anchoring and corporeality, reinforced by mysterious sounds with telluric consonances.
The memory of physical landmarks/places is managed by specific neurons which are activated by proprioceptive recognition: here, the experimenter loses his landmarks in the successive spiral paths. A process of “deconditioning” takes place.

Sound extract