Nous sommes au cinéma: An Immersive Laboratory of Listening-body-place

The work Nous sommes au cinéma (2024 –25) by the artist Julie Faubert asks us to reconsider the notion of the immersive experience outside the parameters specific to the entertainment industry, by which we understand an immersion tacked onto a place, centred on multiple visual and sonic apparatuses that impose distractions coming at us from everywhere and that often lead to a disengagement from the body. This immersion is equivalent to a form of passive forgetting of oneself and others — a forgetting of an “us.” In contrast, by making the specific sonic materialities of the projection room concrete and dynamic, Faubert’s work anchors us in a common and vigilant corporeality. Whereas the cinematic experience is designed more to transport us out of the space through the narrative while the bodies present are passively immersed in darkness, Faubert’s formal strategies call into question the supremacy of the image and allow us to experience the cinematic space in a concrete and polysemic manner even as they activate our political collectivity through listening. Her work evokes what the sound critic and researcher Juliette Volcler calls “critical listening”¹ 1 - Juliette Volcler, “Bâtir une écologie sonore radicale,” in Pour un tournant radical : 8 textes inédits (Paris: Socialter [Bascules], 2022), 71, accessible online (our translation). — that is, a kind of shared vigilance focused on what escapes us, on what often remains imperceptible, buried.