Sound artist and radio producer Amandine Casadamont and artist Reeve Schumacher join forces for a sound creation direct from the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles. The performance echoes the theme of the current exhibition “ … et labora”, which will provide both the setting and the common thread running through this event.

Amandine Casadamont will draw upon the sound archives of France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA) documenting the appearance and development of the assembly line. The testimonies of workers from different production lines will be articulated, in order to build up a portrait of the work itself, but also to investigate the consequences of the speeds and repetitive gestures to which the workers are subjected. This live creation will be informed by concrete sounds – factory environments, tools and machinery – as well as by spoken-word archives.

Reeve Schumacher will join Amandine Casadamont in presenting Sonic Braille, a sound creation using prepared vinyl discs.

Amandine Casadamont is a sound artist and radio creator. Ever since childhood, and thanks to a blind grandfather whose hearing was particularly precious, she has been interested in the medium of radio medium, and more specifically in the “open mike”. For more than twenty years, she has been making sound creations at the crossroads of radio play and performance. Often taking real life as her starting point, she infuses it with fiction, poetry and fantasy. Amandine Casadamont particularly likes to explore dangerous places, such as Fukushima or drug-trafficking zones in the Mexican desert, in order to capture what is invisible there.

In 2019 she became joint curator at the Musée Transitoire (Paris). Collaborating with several European radio stations, such as Deutschlandfunk Kultur, SRF and France Culture, she works as an author, producer and composer – including for the legendary Atelier de création radiophonique. She has won several international awards, including the sound documentary prize at the International Radio Biennial in Mexico (2012) and the Phonurgia prize for radio sound art (2015), and was nominated for the Sound Art category at the New York Festival (2016).

Born in 1981 in Minneapolis in the United States, Reeve Schumacher completed a fine arts degree at the University of Miami before moving to Arles in 2010. There he co-founded LHOSTE, an alternative space dedicated to contemporary art and experimental sound. A visual artist and musician, he performs and exhibits internationally. He has also produced three albums, including Waste Land (2015), based on T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same title.

His Sonic Braille project lies halfway between art and music. Using a precision knife, Schumacher makes incisions on vinyl records in order to manufacture new sounds by hand. Like a finger reading Braille, the needle of the record-player translates these relief markings into sounds. Described by the artist as “art-brut-techno”, this new music allows Reeve Schumacher to transcend genres.

The sound performance presented by Anthony Moore at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles pays tribute to birds and to the ornithologist Luc Hoffmann, who played a pivotal role in the creation of the Fondation. 
An Arles soundscape composed of the sounds of the city will metamorphose little by little into a concert of improvised electronic music, during which poetic songs will dialogue with natural birdsong, creating a unique atmosphere which will unfold over the course of the evening. 

Anthony Moore (*1948) is a musician; from 1996 to 2015 he was a professor at the Academy of Arts Cologne in the department of Art and Media Sciences where he worked on the theory and history of sound. Author of numerous music pieces, songs, sound installations, essays and film compositions which received international prizes. Co-writer with Pink Floyd during the recording of their last three albums. Elected principal of the academy in Cologne from 2000 to 2004. He was the initiator and director of sound events “Per->Son” and “Nocturnes Cologne”. Besides lecturing he continues to write and perform.

Admission to the concert is free. Concert SOLD-OUT !
Prebooking by email is mandatory : concert@fvvga.org (Do not forget to mention your name for each prebooking)
Please note that the number of seats are limited. You will receive a confirmation email within three days. We apologize in advance for any prebooking that will not result in a reservation, as the concert becomes sold-out. 

This spring Swiss composer and musician Fritz Hauser will be playing his fifth concert in Arles.
On the evening of 28 April, Fritz Hauser will be giving a concert of solo percussion inside the 17th-century shallow-vaulted gallery of the Hôtel de Ville in Arles. In incorporating the singular acoustics of this unique venue into his performance, Hauser will be pursuing a musical practice whereby he composes with the reverberation times specific to the space in which he is playing. As an enthusiastic mixer of genres, Hauser understands percussion as an activity that inscribes itself more broadly within the spheres of the physical gesture, space, light, theatre, dance and architecture.
During his visit Hauser will be accompanied by the writer Guillaume Belhomme, with whom he is currently preparing a publication comprising a CD and a text, to be issued under the Lenka lente label. Together they will document the mural and sound piece Die Treppe im Regen / L’Escalier sous la pluie (“The stairs in the rain”), situated in the stairwell of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles and commissioned from Hauser in April 2013 as part of the museum’s inauguration. The CD will be the fruit of a remix of acoustic elements of this installation.

Fritz Hauser (b. 1953 in Basel, Switzerland) has been contributing to the evolution of percussion in contemporary music for over 30 years. He made his first recording as a percussion soloist in the atrium of the famous Martin-Gropius-Bau building in Berlin. Hauser composes for percussion soloists and ensembles and creates sound installations, radiophonic works and film music. His previous concerts in Arles were held on the terrace of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, at the Musée Réattu (a former Grand Priory) and in the church of Saint-Honorat.

// Hôtel de Ville, Arles, entrance from Place de la Mairie