ALEXIS BELLAVANCE
Le Champ
2008
Biography
The works of interdisciplinary artist Alexis Bellavance combine silence, noise and the “contours of time,” and derive from research based on diverse practices: sound art, photography, performance and installation. He is the co-founder of the VIVA! Art Action performance festival, an active member of the Perte de Signal organization, and co-founder, with Nicolas Bernier and Érick d’Orion, of the sound art ensemble BOLD. Bellavance has presented his works on the national and international stages, in Canada, United States, Mexico, Europe, China and Korea.
About the work
Le Champ by Alexis Bellavance
Performed at L’art des bruits, a sound art event curated by Érick d’Orion. Quebec City, Mois Multi, September 18-19, 2008.
A sound field at night, in an empty lot, almost rural. The crystal-clear sound of a triangle opens this performance space. A period of time passes. Slowly reverbed, amplified, then widened, this initially clear sound becomes more complex. The steel of the triangle, its materiality, can gradually be heard. Minutes go by and the sound becomes more and more aerial, until reaching the status of radio waves. This rising sensation we feel is easy to explain: we have gone from the initial live sound waves of the triangle to its infinite atmospheric—indeed, stratospheric—reverberation through electronic means.
The sampling that follows plunges us into the illusions of alchemy, through which the recognizable audio material is transformed into a sky charged with electricity. And then rain, again filled with metal, a weather reading somewhere in 2008. We are immersed for a while in this electrical field. The reverberation that led us here has become distant, to the outer limits of human hearing, but as we become aware of this distance, it begins to lessen. Very slowly, in this backward movement, it gets closer and descends, like a drone over our heads. It remains there, floating heavily in this space. Is it entirely contained by this space? There is reason to doubt this, for it seems instead to have opened up the space, to the point of making it a perceptual non-site. An audio perception quickly becomes a body sensation: an immersion in the ultra-amplified echo of the initial steel triangle.
Nathalie Bachand
Excerpt from “Du bruit au Mois Multi. Et quelques autres considérations sur le son,” published in Inter, art actuel, no. 103 (fall 2009).