Exposing the plot
Dominique Petitgand has spent the past two decades designing and creating sound art that affords varying degrees of prominence to voices, sounds, silence and music, and whose construction and diffusion take account of the particularities and potential of the buildings they are presented in. The works certainly have a dramatic dimension, though it is a challenge to decide whether the words they broadcast constitute speech or narrative and the extent to which they are intended as an act of witness or of creative writing. The visitor – intitially intrigued, even unsettled – soon learns to use the silences, repetition, and incompleteness inherent in the works to rough out and create their own works of fiction. Monotonous sentences spoken in a flat voice are compiled and broadcast so as to mirror the reality they seem to have been drawn from. The artist edits material recorded from various sources to spark chords and resonances between the material itself and its architectural surroundings, thereby developing a narrative mode of writing that is unique within the as yet ill-defined boundaries of sound art. A conversation between two voices that draws on abundant examples and illustrations.
