‘La Réserve des non-dits’ is the first project created as part of the sound residencies at the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. With great delicacy, Youmna Saba, winner of this 2022 residency, went to capture the breath of musical instruments at the heart of their place of conservation.
Sound Art Residency 2022 - Youmna Saba
Winning project : "la Réserve des non-dits"
Content
AN ARTISTIC PROJECT AND AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH
Listen to the tower
The instrument tower is a vast glass column designed to be one of the few storage areas that reveals its contents. Spanning all circulation and exhibition levels, the tower is the backbone of the museum. Imposing, it nevertheless seems to conceal its contents from view.
It houses the musical instruments collected between 1878 and 2020, which now make up the museum's ethnomusicological collection: 8,977 musical instruments that are now silent.
Revealing the inaudible
The artist's first step was to observe the sound behaviour of the instruments in their state as museum objects, in a controlled environment. Youmna Saba's intuition is that sounds persist at the heart of objects.
La Réserve des non-dits sets out to find the micro-sounds emitted by these seemingly silent objects. Out of time, far from the hands or mouths of musicians, Youmna Saba makes the vibrations of the soul of the wood and metal of these instruments audible using transducer speakers, shotgun microphones, piezo microphones placed as close as possible to the instruments, and condenser microphones distributed throughout the museum.
- Listen to an excerpt of the discoveries:
The breath of instruments
Taking into account the requirements of physical conservation and the constraints of an environment that is both secure and exposed to the movement of museum staff in the tower and visitors outside, Youmna Saba's research was characterised by a delicate approach to the objects as well as by the reflective and exploratory power of her findings. Her quest for micro-sounds, which she had intuited, became a true exploration to collect what no one had ever heard before: the breath of the museum's objects.
THE RESERVE AS A RESOURCE(S)
Recording sounds
At the end of the residency, the micro-sounds captured in the tower were recorded to create a music library that will be added to the museum's media library collection so that it can be consulted, shared, reused and expanded.
"A renewable and ever-expanding resource; an invitation to musicians and composers to explore this resource as raw material for creation, and also to researchers to rethink these instruments in terms of their current condition and behaviour, and to re-examine the conservation practices and criteria that underpin research in musicology, organology and instrument making. "
Youmna Saba, 2023
The recordings in the Réserve des non-dits can be downloaded and used freely by anyone, privately or professionally, under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence.
Between space and whispers
Youmna Saba wanted to give visitors access to the intimacy of the sounds she discovered during her explorations. Sound installations in the visitor areas, on different levels of the tower, will allow visitors to listen live to the resonances of certain instruments selected for the diversity and quality of their sound.
Listening and sound manipulation points will be installed on the collections platform and in the music box for several months after the end of the residency.
Residency outcome
Performance
- On Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 March 2023, Youmna Saba presented her residency at the J. K. reading room and gave a performance at the Claude Lévi-Strauss theatre based on the recordings collected during her residency:
Nuit Blanche 2023
Meeting and performance with headphones
During Nuit Blanche 2023, Youmna Saba discussed her sound residency with the public before giving a unique performance with headphones at the Galerie Marc Ladreit de la Charrière.
Youmna Saba
Portrait
Youmna Saba is a musician, composer, and musicologist. She holds a master's degree in musicology from Antonine University in Baabda, Lebanon. Her thesis explores the parallels between visual art and music in the context of traditional Arab arts. Her current research focuses on the relationship between electronic and electroacoustic music and sung Arabic language. This research began with her Taïma’ project, developed during several residencies in France.
These explorations are embodied in several projects: solo and collaborative musical compositions, film scores, electroacoustic experiments, devices for the voice and for the oud, her instrument of choice, and sound design for installations at the NARC museum in Lisbon (in collaboration with Fadi Tabbal).
She has participated in artist residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris 2020-2021), Sharjah Foundation (2022), School for Sonic Memory organised by Theatrum Mundi, Onassis Stegi and the Mucem (2022), Voce CNCM (2020), GMEM (2020), Césaré CNCM (2020-2021), Hwaeom Spiritual Music Residency (South Korea, 2017), Sound Development City (Spain, Morocco, 2016), and Gyeonggi Creation Centre (South Korea, 2013).
She has performed at festivals such as the CTM festival in Berlin (2022), Eclat festival in Stuttgart (2021), Irtijal in Beirut and Berlin (2021-2022), as well as on numerous stages and in cultural venues such as the Pinault Foundation with Tarek Atoui in 2021, the Akademie Der Kunst in Berlin, the Institut du Monde Arabe, Cave12, and the Gugak Centre in Seoul.
Residencies and festivals
- website of Youmna Saba : youmnasaba.com
Music platforms
- Deezer : www.deezer.com/fr/artist/1418101
- Soundcloud : soundcloud.com/youmna-saba
- Bandcamp : youmnasaba.bandcamp.com
Social media
- Instagram : www.instagram.com/youmnasaba/
- Facebook : www.facebook.com/youmnasaba
- Twitter : twitter.com/youmnasaba
Online
La réserve des non-dits en images
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Vue sur la Réserve des non-dits
© musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, photo Julien BrachhammerRead more
Related resources
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Le Fresnoy
External link
External link
Sound library of the Reserve of the Unspoken
Sounds to listen to, download, use, modify or share freely
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