Pali Meursault
he/him · sound recordist · sound artist · composer · author
Since the early 2000s, my work has revolved around sound, experienced as a phenomenon, a material, and a medium. Understood broadly, the realm of sound extends for me to the inaudible dimensions of its energetic manifestations: to infrasound and ultrasound, but also to the radiation of electromagnetic phenomena.
Through processes of recording, production, manipulation, and performance, my research seeks to expand beyond the purely acoustic or electroacoustic aspects of sound, to also explore the social and political dimensions it reveals. It therefore involves paying broader attention to both the social contexts in which a sound emerges and how it operates in new cultural contexts, to the bodies that produce it, and to its effects on those bodies. Microphones and loudspeakers have become my primary tools and instruments in a research project situated at the intersection of visual arts and performance, electroacoustic music, sensory anthropology, and the documentary approach. Through the possibilities of the medium and the uses of the media, this research is constructed in relation to environments, approached as problematic “fields”. For more than 20 years, I have taken my microphones and antennas to abandoned factories, active workplaces or tropical forests, I have examined the movements of alpine glaciers, the songs of insects and electromagnetic fields, I tuned in to radio transmissions or social revolts.
A large part of my work is built in collaboration, with anthropologists Jonathan Larcher and Sophie Houdart (L’Île, project in progress), with glaciologists Lucas Davaze and Antoine Rabatel (Melt*), with the collectives TT-Node or Ici-Même, with sound artists Thomas Tilly (Nix*, Melt*, Radio Glaces), Frédéric Nogray and Lee Patterson (FANT^MS) or Nicolas Montgermont (Feral Bands), with artists and filmmakers Naïs Van Laer (Chroniques d'iun dégel, Orage), Lili Reynaud-Dewar (Gruppo Petrolio) or Camille Llobet (Monstre Pente, Terrain)…
Alongside these activities, I also sometimes teach, coordinate projects or write about sound cultures. In particular, I directed the anthology Tetsuo Kogawa : Radio-Art at Éditions UV and was the guest curator for the exhibition Shaping the æther à l'Espace Multimédia Gantner.