Retours Loge / soundwalks

Composer, sound artist, musician and landscape architect Olga Kokcharova (RU/CH, based in Geneva= focuses on all that is audible and explores sound as a tool to reinvent the way we map reality. She works with analogue modular synthesisers, prepared instruments and field recordings. She uses these sources to create compositions, radio pieces, multichannel electroacoustic improvisations, soundtracks, soundwalks and sound installations in public spaces. She takes part in multidisciplinary laboratories with anthropologists, architects, landscape architects, artists, sociologists and urban planners, with the aim of promoting a collective reflection on the question of sound.

Invited by Arta Sperto to design the “sound portrait” of a cultural institution in Geneva, Kokcharova chose Comédie de Genève. She is interested in the building itself—in its architecture as an instrument and resonant body. Among her observations, she was struck by the diversity of acoustic properties, from the performance halls where sound propagation is tailored to the extreme demands of theatre, to the corridors and halls where waves are chaotically reverberated by concrete, metal and glass surfaces. For the discerning ear, the experience of moving from one space to another is a musical composition in itself. For a fortnight, she was able to collect sounds throughout the building. She sees sound recording as a key moment in which the beginnings of the compositional work already lie. She uses sensors and microphones as instruments of improvisation and spontaneous composition based on real-time sound recording. Her sound creation will be multi-broadcast in one of the dressing rooms of the Comédie, where the actors usually hear what is happening on stage through monitors. A performance version of the work will be presented in the form of soundwalks through and around the building.