A day at the Festival de l'Arpenteur

This summer I had the pleasure of attending several festivals in the region. I began with the Festival de l'Arpenteur, in the Massif de Belledonne. At the end of a path, past the residences that in winter welcome cross-country skiers (if this pursuit is still practicable), lies the bivouac from which my first trail set off (in truth I had set too optimistic a goal for the 10 a.m. start, with the historian Raphaël Lachello, on the millennial and present-day evolutions of the forest).

A first Sound-Sensory Trail, conceived by Gilles Malatray – Desartsonnants (an artist I got to know here, on LinkedIn), who guides our small group of walker-listeners along a forest path at a very, very slow pace. Without commentary, as we try to step away from the noises of the group, our attention turns to the sounds of the wind, the trees, the stream in the distance, an aircraft now and then, few birds. Gilles lends us a few instruments of his own making to listen to the rubbing of moss, the trickling water. Can we really hear the sap of the trees? And hands too, a simple and wonderful means of shaping the sounds that reach our ears. These instruments and the slowness of our movements place our bodies in an active (dis)position for perceiving our surroundings.

A little further on, past the stream, we perceive quite different sounds that overlap: voices, metallic noises, clapping, footsteps, an accelerated music. Young detainees are with us; they took part in a workshop led by Gilles, and for this exceptional "beyond the walls" day they let us hear the result of their work. The peaceful outside receives the sounds from inside a detention facility. The composition is a sonic loop, broadcast simultaneously and at offsets across the clearing where we have arrived. The personality and enthusiasm of these young detainees, the juxtaposition of sound environments, sparked great interest and led to a very lively exchange, right there in the forest, about their situation, their daily life, the sounds we hear, how they worked with Gilles… It was quite unexpected, almost as if this trail (a very short one) had led us to listen not only to the forest where we stood, but also to this particular and, for a detention facility, so strange an environment.