Dialogues avec / with Chantal Dumas
In November 2018, Avatar welcomed Chantal Dumas who was beginning the creation of a radio sound work as part of a major publication project on her practice. Almost a year later, Avatar is proud to present Dialogues avec/with Chantal Dumas.
Conceived as a conversation, Dialogues avec/with Chantal Dumas is an ambitious project in two parts, edited by Caroline Gagné. Volume 1 presents Dumas’s sound compositions, including a new radio work, Le son-refuge. In addition, the volume includes a selection of seventeen works, created between 1993 and 2017 and accompanied by notes, which offer various tracks of reading and listening, or vice versa.
Volume 1 also offers three original sound works created by artists Anna Friz, Carole Rieussec, and Erin Sexton. These works resonate with Dumas’s art, breathing life into a dialogue that draws the public in. “Nothing but Water,” a text by Céline Huyghebaert inspired by these works, completes this compilation.
Dialogues avec/with Chantal Dumas Volume 2 is the title of a finely-designed publication, a rhythmic object that stimulates senses. The authors, all experts in the field, examine the work and evolution of the sound artist’s practice. Developed through conversations with Dumas, their texts understand sound as a fully-fledged language.
In a context where broadcasting and listening increasingly pass via the web, considering an artist’s radio art practice means travelling in time and examining the ever-changing mediums and listening contexts.
Volume 1
Chantal Dumas composes and creates sound installations, radio dramas (Hörspiel), and sound design. Her work has an interactive dimension and thrives on artistic collaborations in visual art, dance, and poetry. A devotee of field recording, she draws on her collection of sounds for the raw material of her compositions. She has produced over thirty radio works, which have been widely broadcast on public radio, including ABC, BBC, France Musique, Sveriges Radio, RAI, ART on AIR (NYC). She has received commissions from Deutschlandradio Kultur (Germany), Kunstradio (Austria), Avatar (Quebec), and the Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago). Among other awards, her work has received an Opus Award in the contemporary and electroacoustic music category from the Conseil québécois de la musique (Quebec), a Bohemia Radio Prize (Czech Republic), and Phonurgia Nova Award (France).
