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Studio XX invited Paule Mackrous as curator to explore the Matricules archive and offer us a Point of View reading of her findings.

 “As a sculptor, my work has consisted for several years now of giving a form to the energy contained in the materiel."
Lorella Abenavolli, Matricules

XX Fantastic

Metamorphosis

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If making the invisible visible is the “main territory of fantastic art" (Brion, 1961: p.41), it is perhaps because explorations in sound art were not yet widely accepted at the time that fantastic art was emerging. Visual fantastical works allow people to grasp invisible phenomena through visual devices, which, to a certain extent, transfigure them. Can technological tools also to allow us to perceive the imperceptible? Many artistic projects archived in Matricules use inaudible mediums. The body creates sounds that we cannot hear, but which, when we work with them, can become tactile materials. These are what Nicole Jolicoeur calls “limit sounds;” the sounds that occur just before speech. She records these “bodily murmurs” and then manipulates them to create a bizarre choir, an intimate melody. Hayley Newman captures the sound of bodies in motion, brushing and knocking against microphones, to create her own chorographical rhythm. She gives us an audible picture of the presence of movement in space. The most common things have their own specific sound. By amplifying these sounds, the objects can be given new properties, like the onion peels manipulated by Magali Babin. Can we still hear the earth we live on despite everything done to deface it? Lorella Abenavoli’s project makes the energy of the earth audible through its movements and vibrations. A tool allows her to take readings from seismometers and transform the earth’s waves into sound. All of these mediums are very real, but they have to be given an audible shape for us to be conscious of them. They have a secret life that technology allows us to uncover. This is how our world is transformed and how it becomes fantastic.