Weaving our stories together — migrations, exiles, passages — so many ways of inhabiting the world
Home is an interactive musical work conceived as a heartfelt homage to mark the 15th anniversary of ensemble soundinitiative. Composed of musicians from six different countries, brought together as each one was building their life in France, the ensemble has made this adventure an experience of creating bonds — a kind of laboratory for reinventing the family sphere: recomposing, expanding, creating new forms of kinship.
The work makes these questions resonate through s-cordatura — a sonic string installation created by composer Michelle Agnes Magalhaes and Frédéric Bevilacqua (IRCAM Pompidou Center, Paris). The musicians move through this architecture, redefine its territories, claim them as their own, share their ways of being, of moving, of entering into dialogue. By touching these threads and collectively interweaving figures, hand to hand, music emerges.
“Playing string figures means passing on connections that matter. It also means telling stories by interweaving our hands, our fingers, our points of attachment. It means, finally, elaborating the conditions for flourishing within finitude, on our planet, the Earth, Terra.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble
The project unfolds in tableaux inspired by personal narratives. Each sequence welcomes — like a house made of sounds — solos and duets in which the performers weave together their stories of migration, exile, and passage. A way of reclaiming space, of revealing their own perspective on how they anchor themselves within or move through places, with a repertoire representative of each musician's artistic world.
A musical journey through entanglement — our relations to place, to the living, to the world.
Open exchange on the themes of human displacement, the reconstruction of a safe space, and rituals of settling in. This time also allows the participants to inhabit the stage space and experience the s-cordatura installation firsthand. A practice and transmission workshop can be organized prior to the performance. Other transmission formats can be envisioned over a longer timeframe (all audience or specific workshops for musicians, dancers, performers, etc).
workshop for musicians and dancers (Conservatoire de Saint-Brice-sous-forêt, Conservatoire d'Ivry-Sur-Seine, C ND Camping In Vivo Manifeste
Dancers playing s-cordatura (C ND National Dance Center workshop / Manifeste IRCAM)
Maussane Lerer (dancer) playing s-cordatura
This work is in dialogue with various conceptions of the line as a relational principle. It draws inspiration from string figures, one of humanity's oldest practices. As Donna Haraway writes in Staying with the Trouble: "String figures are ways of thinking as much as doing, pedagogical practices as much as cosmological performances."
How many times, feeling troubled in our own world, have we sought refuge in music? It becomes a means of sensing and accompanying our inner narratives. In this proposition, threads join music: traced trajectories, memories, histories interwoven with sounds and gestures.
Lines connect us all: lifelines, cartographic lines, and those that run through human activities — writing, pathways, drawing, weaving, and ultimately musical scores (Tim Ingold, A Brief History of Lines). HOME is nourished by this perspective in which a line is never simply a mark, but a living principle of relation. The work weaves together universal dimensions — displacement, memory, dwelling — and autobiographical fragments: sensitive narratives that build a house made of sounds, in polyphonies, in superimposed layers of space and time.
This participatory dimension is rooted in the memory and universe of Latin American interactive art of the 1960s and 1970s: the Parangolés of Hélio Oiticica, which invite the public to wear the works and dance with them; the relational objects of Lygia Clark, which summon the experience of self and other. HOME places the gesture of transformation and reappropriation at the very heart of musical and artistic invention.
Nasses Mufti, Multispecies Cat’s Cradle, Maureen Lander, String Games (detail), Helio Oiticica - Parangolé, Lygia Clark Rede de elástico
The s-cordatura installation is a musical and performative space composed of tensioned threads equipped with motion sensors connected to a computer system that triggers sounds in real time. The anchor points of the cables are mobile: the work continuously reconfigures itself according to the movements within it. The gestures of performers and visitors leave traces, rendering displacement visible and audible in the form of lines or planes.
When the strings of s-cordatura are touched and set in motion, they trigger pre-recorded sounds made by the musicians: instrumental fragments and/or voices. The body is invited to redraw, signify, and shift perspectives — to endlessly reinvent space. This plastic and flexible instrument generates, at each performance, a singular sonic response through its computational architecture, based on the transformation and recombination of sounds.
This interactive electronic interface was designed by composer Michelle Agnes Magalhaes and Frédéric Bevilacqua (ISMM Sound Music Movement Interaction team - IRCAM), was supported by the S+T+ARTS residency (European Commission).
Michelle Agnes Magalhaes and Frédéric Bevilacqua