<Parler de loin ou bien se taire>

Through poetry, performance, and installation, Anne Le Troter's sound work explores the mechanisms of language. Focusing primarily on sociolects, the dialects of a particular social class or professional group, her works are made up of words that have been collected, cut up, and reassembled.

In Parler de loin ou bien se taire (“At distance speak, or hold your tongue”), Le Troter created portraits of anonymous people on the basis of 400 interviews conducted by a sperm bank with its donors as well as comments by the business’ employees. The artist shows how, within a body of work, word choice, syntax, and intonation transformed the donors into stereotyped, ‘marketable’ characters. The resulting sound composition, described by the artist as a "pre-adolescent nursery rhyme, naïve and intoxicating", engenders a sense of confusion: the voices seem to evoke a single person rather than several hundred individuals.

As is often the case with the artist's work, the sound piece unfolds within an installation conceived as a collective listening environment. The sound is diffused by loudspeakers placed on rotating trays, so that the cables connecting them stretch and relax as if in a breathing movement. Conjuring up an imaginary world that is both organic and medical, this space responds to the artist's desire to give "the spoken word a territory and a body".

Philippe Bettinelli