The World Starts Every Minute!, 2007, wood and metal construction. Multichannel sound space and fictional space.
The World Starts Every Minute! offers an immersive, ambulatory environment that combines different modes of sound spatialisation on a system of 13 loudspeakers divided into two groups: an almost invisible hexaphonic system, hidden behind wall-coloured fabrics, made up of 6 equidistant loudspeakers that tower above visitors, and a set of 7 coloured conical horns, hung on the walls at different heights, that invite visitors to come closer and listen. Particular care has been taken at every stage, from recording the sound using the best equipment to broadcasting it through top-quality loudspeakers, to achieve a transparency that makes you forget the very existence of the medium.
Some sound sources move only in the hexaphonic space, others in all the loudspeakers. Others, just as numerous, are located precisely in one of the pavilions, giving each of them a provisional identity, that of the speaker breathing, whispering, speaking, laughing or shouting, which varies over the course of the installation's 10-minute loop.
The result is a succession of moments in which different voices respond to each other in specific zones, on small sets of cones. As they move around, the spectators change their point of view, their listening point, prioritising the interventions and creating their own spatialisation of sound, superimposed on the wider sound, which is deployed on the hexaphonic space and whose movements draw the spectators into a whirlwind of sound, punctuated by breaks, footsteps, ethereal songs, muffled rumblings, crowd movements, gunshots, screams, intimate sequences, discreet or unbridled, communicative laughter.
It's an open narrative that spans all ages, from birth to death, and in which each person discovers personal or family resonances, heightened by the transparency of the listening, which creates an almost tactile presence, behind the coloured veil that covers the pavilions, of each of these women, above all, but also of these men who have given their voices to this project.
Todor Todoroff
The World Starts Every Minute was commissioned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Angers (F), and premiered there from December the 14th 2007 to April the 13th 2008.
Text by Alexandre Castant :
Marie-Jo Lafontaine’s piece The World Starts Every Minute is a sound and sculpture installation whose environment gives off gravity, lightness, physicality and intensity, is made together with Todor Todoroff. Todor Todoroff is both a sound engineer and composer. Sound, laughter and song are therefore the constituent elements in The World Starts Every Minute that function because of the precise, sophisticated spatial, fictional and dramatic staging created by the soundtrack.
In The World Starts Every Minute, the seven acoustic cones and the hexaphonics form a space for sound, but the spatialisation of the sound itself, its amplitude, its movement tightening, bursting forth, comes from the seven loudspeakers. As a whole, they create an experience of space made up of sounds which are unleashed or suspended, which move as subtly and vertiginously as a swell of waves ebbing and flowing, producing a sensation of moving, vibrating volumes, a perceptual world made of plastically invisible sound. The spectator, moving around, moves closer to the acoustic cones as if drawn in by a magnet, by sounds that absorb and need to be more closely examined.
