Sound installations

157 motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes: 60x20x20cm (2014)

Born in 1977, Zimoun is a contemporary Swiss sound artist who lives and works in Bern. Self-taught, he is mainly known for designing installations that draw as much on the fields of volume and sculpture as on that of sound art. He assembles simple, functional materials and components (cardboard, boxes, small motors), ordinary industrial objects, playing on their profusion and multiplication.

The almost obsessive geometric arrangement of his installations expresses “a tension between the orderly patterns of modernism and the chaotic forces of life” he tells us.

Starting from objects of simple make —a cardboard box inside which a small motor drives a cotton ball that gently knocks against its walls— he manages, by multiplying them, sometimes into several hundred units, to endow these everyday sound objects with a genuinely organic life in which the acoustic hum of natural phenomena crackles, wriggles, stirs, comes alive, swarms, until it fills and “inhabits” the whole sound space of the places where he installs his minimalist constructions.

In his works Zimoun conducts a systematic exploration of multiplied mechanical rhythm, in perpetual renewal, artificially recreating the complexity of improbable living organisms that confer emotional depth and a poetic dimension on objects that are ordinarily inert.

His installations, which most often rest on simple mechanical devices, are not concerned solely with revealing the invisible aspect of the life of moving objects; they can just as well account for its no less imperceptible aspect, as in this installation of 2009, which presents an ordinary-looking tree stump fitted with a directional microphone, which betrays and amplifies the destructive activity of the termites devouring it with undisguised sonic enthusiasm.

25 termites, wood, microphone, sound system (2009)

Video made by Zimoun presenting a selection of his installations created over the past ten years.

Click here to visit Zimoun’s website.