"Creative practices are valuable assets to navigate a world where denial and invisibilation are occulting the climate crisis that we are facing. As an art practitioner, I believe we have the ability to shift paradigms of our society by shaping alternative narratives to inspire positive changes."
About
Mathias Arrignon is an artist from Val-de-Marne (France), currently residing in London and working across Europe. Driven by listening, he is using this sensitive language to foster environmental care and to narrate realities which suffer from invisibilation. His works merges field recording practices, audio technology, interactive installations and participatory performances to instil forms of interconnectedness with worlds that are more than human.
As a sound designer with a strong interest in media of transmission, he is working for audio-visual productions to facilitate the development of narratives whether on radiophonic waves, or through the audible strata of films and documentaries. On a more transdisciplinary level, his expertise in contemporary audio technology is also at the intersection of several fields by collaborating with artists and design studios.
As a practitioner, his work has been presented at Southwark Park Galleries, Without Form Space, British Council Spark Festival, Field Kitchen Academy and Anthropos Ex. His compositions have been broadcast on Resonance FM, Phonurgia Nova and Sonic Matter. In 2020, he won a Sound of the Year Award from the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Project Highlights
Oceanomicon
A sound installation with a touch-responsive map made with fabric.
The Oceanomicon is a cartographic artefact which emerges from the corrosive wake of the Carbon Gas in the One Ocean. This large-scale object made with fabric and cyanotype is more than a mere world map that one can only appreciate by sight; it is a sensory cartography of knowledge and affect, operating on the edge of human perception. From the folds of this liminal atlas, a conductive wiring harness and a bundle of audio devices are interfaced between the fabric’s membrane and the antenna of two theremins, creating an infra-sensible channel of amplification.
By touching the blue of the map with the tip of your fingers, find the porosity between the terrestrial and the oceanic life. If you channel the ether waves of the theremins in you, an environmental murmur will be unveiled by the ebb and flow: the intimate sound of the seawater in your veins under the increasing acidification.
To the hum of the forest
A hybrid radio documentary and electro-acoustic piece (stereo | 24min20)
On the threshold of pastoral pulsations, pilgrim legends and aerial contrails of the Swiss army, a sycamore tree stands peacefully on the edge of the Heiligkreuz forest, nestled in the mountainous regions of the Lucerne canton. Like a living monument, it is shrouded in vegetal memories where the deep time is infused in the narrative, gradually unfolding a sensitive reading of the environment in its most intimate geological strata. In spite of its rootedness, the tree suggests a motion to its audience, a walk which would allow to feel closely tied to the liminality of the woods, as if the sensation of an ineffable reality would become almost tangible.
Project Gallery
