MELTING ICE
The experience plunges the audience into the center of the action during one of the
most worrying phenomena on the planet: the break-up of the biggest glaciers in the polar regions.
“We are on the edge of the Antarctic continent, under the vast cliffs of the Astrolabe Glacier. It is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, that extraordinary time when life returns to the small nearby islands after the forbidding polar winter. Penguins, seals and seabirds all come back at this time of year to give birth to their young. There are tens of thousands of them. Except this year, temperatures have never been so high…”
LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY
This sound experience confronts the listener with the decrease of biodiversity on the planet, through a symphony that is losing intensity.
“Hedged farmland in Normandy. Stretching from the 1950s to today, this audio experience confronts listeners with the reduction in biodiversity through a symphony that declines in intensity. We are in an area of hedged farmland in France, early on an April morning. It’s spring, that special time of year when all the birds and insects sing, creating an outpouring of sound. The experience begins some forty years ago.
The years pasted, and the listener notices that all the soloists, the instrumentalists of this animal concert are gradually disappearing, impoverishing the production, as if musicians little by little stopped the pieces they were in the process of playing.”
DEFORESTATION
This experience is the result of Luc’s work in the tropical forests of Gabon. It relates the various phases of deforestation and its impact on the biodiversity of these forests.
“When you enter a primary forest, it is teeming and noisy. An initial team of men arrives to disrupt the symphony, marking out the trees to be cut. The great apes and birds are on alert. A second team comes through to build vast access roads. This first clearance work frightens and displaces the animals.
And now it’s time to cut. We hear the cutting front approaching. At the foot of a giant marked for felling, we will experience its fall. The deafening noise of chain saws, the creak of the trunk as it falls and, suddenly, an intense silence.”
FOREST FIRE
Like “Deforestation”, this experience recounts the progression of a fire that will
devastate hundreds of hectares of forest.
“A major fire in a forest is a wave, it’s like a tsunami coming through. Its beginnings can
be heard from a distance, a general warning is sounded. Panic ensues. The animals
shriek. Those that can, flee – running, flying. The fire can be heard approaching.
The tree trunks explode, the nearby stream dries up in the heat. The fire submerges us,
and then moves away. Silence falls.”
