Civil Defence Siren: Spatialisation and Spatial Plasticity

The research have started with this beautiful object (in picture) of the civil defence siren which very characteristic sound both recalls the soundscape of my childhood and the unique geopolitical context of my hometown, Lyon. As it rings every first Wednesday of each month at noon, this sound inherited from WWII acts both as a call for remembrance and an ominous reminder of the war threats, the terrorism and the unbelievably high risk of industrial catastrophes with the city’s very high concentration of chemical factory and nuclear power plant. This strong spatial context leads on a conversation about remembrance (with John Donne’s metaphysical and humanist meditations) and owning the narration of tragedies and catastrophes in displaying them (with Susan Philipsz’s work Study for Strings). Making sound in a ‘visual art’ realm calls for new definitions and challenging the pre-existing ones which (in the anglophone area) are exclusionary of emerging and ambivalent art forms such as sound art and new medias (hot take: we have other senses than the sight). In re-contextualising what it means to ‘be’ and to ‘belong’ somewhere (with the help of Gascia Ouzounian and Brandon LaBelle’s brilliant theoretical writings), I finally deconstruct this idea, making abstraction of it, to concentrate only on the physical space, architectural and 3D volume. Through the lens of Thom Kubli’s playful interaction and materialisation of sound in space and my synaesthetic experience of the acousmonium , I propose to imagine sound as a ‘physical matter’, a ‘plastic’ we can model and shape, a sculptural medium transcending sense, the space itself and our body: this is ‘spatial plasticity’.