{"id":3045,"date":"2026-11-10T15:59:08","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T14:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/?p=3045"},"modified":"2026-11-11T02:45:46","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T01:45:46","slug":"silent-echoes-le-mans-de-bill-fontana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/silent-echoes-le-mans-de-bill-fontana\/","title":{"rendered":"SILENT ECHOES – LE MANS"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sound no longer meant for the ear,<\/em>
Deeper ear that listens to us<\/em>
False listeners. Conversion of space.<\/em>
Projection outward of inner worlds\u2026\u00a0<\/em>

Gong<\/em>, Rainer Maria Rilke (1925)
Translated from the French version by Philippe Jaccottet.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n

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The sound installation Silent Echoes Le Mans<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Californian artist Bill Fontana, patron of this fourth edition of the biennial, continues his work on silent resonances with his new sound sculpture Silent Echoes Le Mans,<\/em> installed on the Esplanade des Jacobins. In this new work, he draws on the resonance of five of the six bells of the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, specially transported for the occasion and displayed across the great Place des Jacobins, in the gardens of Saint-Julien Cathedral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These bells are silent, and yet, even when they are not ringing, they are constantly vibrating. Paradoxically, this surprising situation \u2013 the absence of ringing, the bells\u2019 silence \u2013 makes it possible to use a basic acoustic phenomenon shared by all vibrating bodies: their vibration always generates sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The bells are, in a sense, like ears, sensitive to every sound that occurs around them. To reveal these normally inaudible vibrations, very high-precision seismic accelerometers are fixed inside the bells. These ultra-sensitive sensors respond to the vibrations of the bells as they are set resonating by everything that makes sound and noise around them. The result is a continuous halo of sound, constantly evolving with the changes in the sound environment, the rain, the wind\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the bells constantly generate a low tone, with overtones that follow their own spectral structure and vary with the intensity and frequency of the ambient sounds around them. The dull, constant, nearby rumble of traffic excites the low frequencies of the bell\u2019s vibration, while high-pitched sounds, such as the carillon of Saint-Julien Cathedral or car horns, bring out the highest overtones. This phenomenon of vibration endlessly producing sound evokes the ancient mystical idea of an eternal music of the spheres arising from the environment, the world or the universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These sound vibrations, the resonances picked up by the sensors, are then amplified, distributed and spatialised over some thirty loudspeakers arranged in a circle, as if to recall the shape of a gigantic bell on the Esplanade des Jacobins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bill Fontana\u2019s art can be seen as a complex dialectical relationship between the naturalism of representational art and Marcel Duchamp\u2019s strategy of the \u2018found\u2019 object, so dear to Fontana\u2019s mentor John Cage. By removing an ordinary everyday object from its usual context, designating it as a work of art and placing it in a museum, Duchamp gave it a new sense and a new meaning. Fontana does the same with sounds, moving them away from their original source and primary function to charge them with another, memorial symbolism, pointing to the impermanence of all things and to the fragility of these imposing, massive bronze bells, recently recast for the Abbey of Fontevraud in memory of those destroyed during the French Revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sound environments created by Bill Fontana renew our awareness of the places we inhabit and of the powerful role sound plays for us, both in self-awareness and in memory. Fontana\u2019s projects seek to arouse a dynamic sense of the natural environment, a continuous and invigorating presence that revives our awareness of the narrative envelope that sounds form around our lives. At a first level, his work rests on a careful investigation of the way we perceive sounds in reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout his career, Fontana has created a series of projects that subtly address the interplay between the origins of sounds and the context in which they are perceived. In doing so, he invites the listener to become aware of themselves and their sensations, and so to perceive their everyday world anew.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The versions of Silent Echoes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally, Silent Echoes Le Mans<\/em> was a sound sculpture created in 2022, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and Ircam for the ManiFeste festival under the title Silent Echoes, Notre-Dame<\/em>. In Paris, throughout the restoration of Notre-Dame after the 2019 fire, the cathedral\u2019s ten bells had fallen silent. Silent Echoes<\/em> then sought to make audible a secret scene at Notre-Dame: even silent, the ten bells never stop vibrating. Thanks to ultra-sensitive vibration sensors \u2013 seismic accelerometers \u2013 fitted to the great bells, the acoustic image of the cathedral and the imprint of a city were revealed and projected elsewhere, from the south terrace on level 5 of the Centre Pompidou, facing the two towers of Notre-Dame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, the installation has gone through several versions: the project moved to the Dachstein ice caves in Austria for the Goiserer Musiktage, as part of the European Capital of Culture 2024. The sound of the bells echoed that of the melting glacier, highlighting the fragility of both monuments and warning us of the dangers of global warming. In this way the pair forms a \u201csound bridge\u201d, to be relayed to various venues and cultural events across Europe and beyond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silent Echoes<\/em> then travelled to Asia, to Taiwan, before a version for the Vatican entitled Great Bell<\/em> was installed in the great entrance of St Peter\u2019s Basilica; the work then came to Le Mans, to the Esplanade des Jacobins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a future version, Silent Echoes<\/em> will travel to the United States, to Philadelphia, to the cracked bell known as the Liberty Bell<\/em> \u2013 symbol of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 \u2013 for its 250th<\/sup> anniversary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Fontana<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio, Bill Fontana studied music and philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. A decisive encounter with the composer John Cage, who taught him his conception that \u201ceverything is music\u201d \u2013 that any sound event can be considered music \u2013 was a true revelation for the young artist. He then travelled to Australia, Japan and Germany before devoting himself to composition. He began creating sound sculptures in 1976.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over a career now spanning 55 years, Bill Fontana has built an international reputation through his pioneering experiments with sound. Since the late 1960s, he has consistently used sound as a sculptural medium to interact with, and transform, the perception of visual and architectural spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drawing on his background in composition, he extracts sound patterns from the natural and man-made world to create sound works that can evoke visual images in the listener\u2019s mind. He has created sound sculptures and radio projects for institutions, museums and broadcasters around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fontana\u2019s projects have explored hybrid listening technologies using acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural\/material sensors (accelerometers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Post Museum, Frankfurt; the Art History and Natural History Museums, Vienna; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London; the 48th Venice Biennale; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; MAXXI, Rome; and MAAT, Lisbon. He has made many works for radio, an ideal medium for his artistic language, for the BBC, the European Broadcasting Union, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, West German Radio (WDR), Swedish Radio, Radio France and Austrian State Radio. His best-known works include Distant Trains<\/em>, Satellite Ear Bridge Cologne-San Francisco<\/em>, The Sound of an Unblown Flute<\/em>, Panoramic Echoes<\/em> and Acoustical Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge<\/em> as well as the series Silent Echoes<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Co-production: Ircam Centre Pompidou,<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ing\u00e9nieur du son : Luca Bagnoli, Lucas Ciret<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Computer music designer: Dionysios Papanicolaou<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video design: David Moreau<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Son qui n\u2019est plus pour l\u2019oreille,Oreille plus profonde qui nous \u00e9couteFaux \u00e9couteurs. Conversion d\u2019espace.Projet dehors de mondes int\u00e9rieurs\u2026\u00a0 Gong, Rainer Maria Rilke (1925)Traduction de Philippe Jaccottet. L\u2019installation sonore Silent Echoes Le Mans L\u2019artiste californien Bill Fontana, parrain de cette quatri\u00e8me \u00e9dition de la biennale, prolonge son travail sur les r\u00e9sonances silencieuses avec sa nouvelle sculpture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,6,1,59],"tags":[163,42,188,65],"class_list":["post-3045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-installations-sonores","category-musee-du-son","category-uncategorized","category-terrasse","tag-art-contemporain","tag-art-sonore","tag-cloches","tag-installation-sonore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3045"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3150,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3045\/revisions\/3150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philippelanglois.net\/lcd\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}