<Silent Echoes in the Dachstein Glacier>

Following in the footsteps of John Cage, who expanded the field of music to include all sounds, without hierarchy, Bill Fontana developed his own concept of sound sculpture in the late 1960s. His work takes as its starting point the amplification of our ability to listen. To this end, he uses powerful vibration sensors to reveal and compose sounds that are inaudible to the naked ear. Working on specific sites, the artist is interested in what today’s soundscapes have to say, in this case about the impact of human activity on the environment.

Silent Echoes in the Dachstein Glacier entails a double displacement. The first is to reproduce the sound of the bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in an ice cave in the Dachstein, a mountain range in the Austrian Alps. This first work can only be heard in situ, in the cave itself. Visitors are surprised to hear the sound of bells mixed with the dripping and cracking of the melting ice. But if they listen carefully, they can also perceive in these resonances the sounds around the cathedral that make the bells vibrate, and that they pick up without being aware of it: sirens, engine noises, birdsong…. Through them, a whole world is shifted into the Dachstein cave, and in the end,the two places are intertwined or coexist. To capture these sounds, Bill Fontana attached seismic accelerometers to the bells – which fell silent after the cathedral burned down in 2019 – that are sensitive to the slightest vibrations that pass through them, in a sense turning them into ears.

The second displacement captures this strange interweaving and projects it elsewhere, to a third place, in this case the façade of the West Bund Museum. This experience is entirely different. Passers-by or visitors to the museum will no longer hear one place in another but two places that have become a single continuum of sound, which they will only be able to distinguish if they take the time to analyse the surrounding image. In the heart of a melting glacier, bronze ears echo the sounds they heard in the middle of a big city. One place against another, which it is up to the listener to (re)reconcile.

Bastien Gallet