The project in brief:

With the Ballade du Fou, Zahra Poonawala provides a new opportunity to travel both inside and with a sound. The work is a continuation of previous works that already allowed sound to be heard not as an impenetrable surface, but as a volume to go through via movement and listening. These works, like Tutti, were also based on a dialogue between the movements of the spectator/listener and those of the sound objects. The result was an increased awareness of the plasticity of sound, of its living character.

In the Ballade du Fou, the sound configurations evolve according to the physical relationship between the spectator and the installation. As the spectator approaches, a ceramic loudspeaker comes alive and emits a song, that of a soprano, while following the spectator’s movement through its rotations. The composition of this ballad was entrusted to Gaëtan Gromer. By approaching or moving away, the spectator can make the music evolve: the soprano is ‘influenced’ by them, sometimes shy, sometimes inhabited, revealing a palette of different nuances and regional accents. The original classical lied is revealed under unexpected facets.

For a fraction of a second, you feel as if you are in a souk in Marrakech, a seaside resort in California, a city under alert in Japan or an amusement park in France. Triggered by our movement, a stream of words and sounds travels to us, attracting attention, calling us to prayer, arousing desire or evoking danger.

The project in brief:

Public Address System is a sound installation, placed in the public space, that broadcasts a recorded sound that has been emitted through a speaker of the same type elsewhere in the world. The sequences are triggered randomly when a person passes in front of it. You can hear recorded sounds, among others, in Paris, Tokyo, Isfahan, Montreal, Moscow, Kathmandu, Pokhara (Nepal), Geneva, Strasbourg, Dublin, Buenos Aires, Angoulême (France), Minoto (Japan), San Diego, Prague, Vienna, Bangalore (India), Rome, Shanghai, Wattwiller (France), Manama (Bahrain) and sounds from imaginary cities, such as Yirminadingrad for example. This collection creates a real poetic and musical universe composed of quotations encountered along their journeys and plays with the sound poetry of the various places.

> The work was awarded the 3rd European Digital Art Prize Imagina Atlantica in Angouleme.