Dominique Leroy currently takes part in the residency ‘Avant la poussière/Before the Dust’ together with Jef Rolez at Le Lieu Unique, Nantes. The residency is the fourth in a series organized by the project ‘Under the Sand’. The first three took place in Gafsa, Tunisia, well-known for its phosphate mining industry. ‘Under the Sand’ was initiated by Wilfried Nail in collaboration with Souad Mani and promotes transdisciplinary and international meetings between artists over a period of three years (2016-19). It wants to valorize the area of Gafsa close to the Tunisian desert through a series of residencies and exhibitions in Tunisia and France hoping to initiate a recurring event – a biennial meeting in which art, scientific research and territory encounter each other.

The territory of Gafsa is turned into an open-air laboratory for artistic research and experiments in collaboration with partners, students, habitants and local artisans, the university and the Governorate of Gafsa. ‘Under the Sand’ takes an ‘archeo-artistic’ look at the territory and interrogates its landscapes in a historical, political, ecological and utopic way. It uses the archeological means of excavation, extraction and filtering to reveal the non-visible of this territory.

Le Lieu Unique will show the third exhibition of the project with Marion Zilio as invited curator and work by Minhee Kim, Dominique Leroy, Amélie Labourdette, Wilfried Nail, Pascale Rémita et Benoit Travers.

For ‘Under the Sand’ Dominique Leroy and Jef Rolez make use of the same creative process as in Tunisia to explore and use the spatial, sound and vibratory components of the space of Le Lieu Unique. Around Lake Gafsa they strained nylon threads to vibrate in the wind and transmitted the frequencies through resonators crafted with found objects (e.g. tins, a truck hose), placed facing the cliff. The installation played with the echo and acoustic ecology of the space – the sound ricochets on the water, the song of the frogs, the rebounds on the cliff.

In Nantes Dominique Leroy and Jef Rolez use the same principle during their residency. Echoing the installation in Gafsa they place a recording device that grafts itself on the architecture and the flows of Le Lieu Unique by exploiting the different skins of the building that separate us from different spaces and the exterior – Plexiglas glazing, metal frames,floors and staircases. Different visible and invisible networks are revealed such as the boiler room, the electromagnetic fields of the neon lamps, the Wi-Fi network. The infrastructure thus becomes a sound instrument. Leroy and Rolez use numerous Wi-Fi modems to transmit sounds and data from one point to another, from one floor to another. The work consists out of the manipulation of the different recordings on the spot; the manufacturing of mechanical, electronic, acoustic and digital devices that work as live handmade instruments. During the exhibition and on the internet, this will result in a kind of ‘listening contact’ with a specific space in the building of Le Lieu Unique.

More images and video to follow next week.

Vernissage 9 February 2018
Exhibition 10-27 February 2018

Tuesday-Saturday 2-7pm; Sunday 3-7pm

Le Lieu Unique, Quai Ferdinand-Favre,
44000 Nantes, France

http://under-the-sand.org/