Sound Reactivations project
In my Sound Reactivations projects, I have long been committed to searching for, finding and cataloguing spaces suitable for reactivation through sound. These are closed, uninhabited, abandoned places; physically difficult to reach or access and publicly inaccessible for public and collective activities.
Sounds are reactivated inside these spaces, allowing them to be inhabited through listening. Sound propagates through space and passes through opaque and impenetrable barriers.
Audio/video documentation of performances carried out on site without an audience will enable a wider audience to experience the event through its multimedia reactivation.
"In Benjamin account of reactivation, the reproduction (document) of an art object or performance (…) allows us to reproduce for ourselves the thing reproduced, to bring it to life, to reactivate it, so as to be able to experience it in our present moment. Listening to recorded music is perhaps the most straightforward example." *1
"One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced."*2
Another reference is the 1972 Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. As a documentary film it is the band's concert with the largest audience, even though there was no live audience at the time: it would have been impossible and forbidden to have one in the fragile space of the ancient Pompeii amphitheatre.
I have so far achieved these Sound Reactivations:
Inner I Verden Sound Installation for the photo exhibition Inner i Verden / Inside the World. Spitsbergen Artists Center, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. June 7, 2025
Broadcast Radio Gruve 7, FM 100.2 Temporary radio Station Broadcast. Spitsbergen Artists Center, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. June 7 - June 30, 2025
Radio Reactivation Port Bou Ephemeral FM radio broadcast 180' Meeting Walter Benjamin, Port Bou,
September 27-29, 2025
Deserted Dreams Voices in Sahara desert ∞ Café Tissardmine's oasis, Sahara, Morocco, January 25, 2026
1 - Philip Auslander, Reactivions, Essays on Performance and its documentation, University Michigan Press, 2008
2 - Walter Benjamin, 1935, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, dans, Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968