Using real sounds (field recording), the sound piece recomposes a fictional reality in which the listener is led to sensorially experience the course of a Venezuelan river, now threatened with pollution from illegal gold mining, by following the water's journey from the river's headwaters to the sea passing through extractivist machinery. Together, the abstract sculpture (created using 3D printing and representing the topography of a Venezuelan river in the Canaima region) and the sound piece tells us about the arrival of technology in an ancestral forest, and question the dichotomy between nature and culture, humans and other living beings (animals, plants...) engendered by the binarity of our contemporary technological systems.

 

The sounds are mostly taken from recordings made in the Bolivian Amazon during my wanderings. At the end of the journey, the extractivist machine we hear is in fact a washing machine with its repetitive cycles, a metaphor for a contemporary society caught in its own trap.

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Sound piece / Iga Vandenhove, Antonin Bexon, Isabel Judez

Field recordings / Iga Vandenhove

Original sculpture / Isabel Judez

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Exhibition / Le Hublot, Ivry-sur-Seine  - From 3 to 17 february 2023