Container
2024 / 5’min loop
Sound Piece




From an early age, I was always interested in how words sound, not just the objects themselves. At the time, I was unaware of the concepts of logophilia and phonophilia, but over time, I learned that this fascination has a name. If that led me to my current profession, who knows?

My work frequently involves recording sounds of human activities that I don’t fully comprehend, both in terms of their content and form. This role grants me access to information that often lies outside my personal concerns. At other times, when I don’t understand the speaker’s language, it allows me to listen differently —interpreting the words purely as another layer of sound.

It can be challenging to position yourself as a passive listener, maintaining a certain distance from what is being said, whether it’s scripted or not.
Surely tricky for a person with a broad interest in language/communication, as an inherently sophisticated tool, acknowledging the implications and responsibilities of its misuse.

That said, at the end of a long workday, I’m just a sound recordist, not a linguist or anything else. It’s probably a comfortable role to adopt, but a necessary one. You are regularly exposed to messages that conflict with your ideals and thoughts, which take on amplified significance, hidden behind isolated headphones. In the professional environment where this occurs, your need to confront them may be censored and could have consequences.

After several years of being involved in projects where my distance was obvious and intentional, I began to question how much of a political body I was within, especially when it comes to the restrictive social contracts of a paid job. The boundaries of these contracts seemed to shape my interactions, constraining genuine connection and forcing a compartmentalization.

In the fall of 2023, I spent a few weeks in Bordeaux filming a documentary. Despite the geographical proximity and the similarities French shares with my mother tongue, my lack of knowledge of the language remains significant. While I can navigate and understand certain contexts when it is written, my inability to form coherent sentences when it is spoken is deeply frustrating.

This loop piece, which uses material recorded during interviews, reflects on my current contradictions regarding some of my professional activities. By focusing on how words sound rather than their meaning, I explore a deliberate need to overlook, discern, and discard the vast amount of information received (noise), and consider whether it is possible to generate something personally meaningful from it.
The structure relies on cut-and-paste, repetition, and superimposition, aiming to strip the words of their original purpose and context, and perhaps even suggest new significance.