First House of Echo – A series of listening sessions by Félicia Atkinson
La Galerie, CAC, Noisy-le-Sec From December 2017 to March 2018
Félicia Atkinson offered an immersive sensorial experience founded on listening and created the conditions for developing a special kind of attention as well as an affective point of contact with other women artists. During a seven-month residency at La Galerie, she organized a series of deep listening sessions inspired by the work of American composer and musician Pauline Oliveros. Lasting two hours, these sessions established the preconditions for a certain type of listening enabling the audience “to enter into the music or let it enter into them”, as Atkinson put it. Whether directionless, intense, attentive or furtive, this listening fed a kind of memory from one session to another, perhaps inducing a community of experience. During the sessions, Atkinson presented her own music as well as that of guest musicians and women composers ranging from Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century Benedictine mystic, musician, linguist and physician, to Delia Derbyshire, the 20th-century composer of electronic and concrete music. She guided the listening process with her own voice, using it to establish new sensory channels for the transmission, interlinking and intermingling of these women’s practices, and branching off down paths that were not those of a linear history of music. Throughout her residency, she created hospitality situations, offering other improvised moments of sharing and sensory experiences outside chronological time.
Program :
– Listening session # 1 December 9, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Pauline Oliveros and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 2 : January 13, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Hildegarde de Bingen and Alice Coltrane and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 3 : January 20, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Eliane Radigue and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 4 : January 27, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Myriam Amacher, Delia Derbyshire, Daphné Oram and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 5 : February 17, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 6 : February 24, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.
– Listening session # 7 : March 10, from 4pm to 6pm. With sound works by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and Adèle Sébastian and a new piece by Félicia Atkinson.