The work Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em> (2024\u200a\u2013<\/em>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\u200a\u2014\u200aa forgetting of an \u201cus.\u201d In contrast, by making the specific sonic materialities of the projection room concrete and dynamic, Faubert\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201ccritical listening\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Juliette Volcler, \u201cB\u00e2tir une \u00e9cologie sonore radicale,\u201d in Pour un tournant radical : 8 textes in\u00e9dits<\/em> (Paris: Socialter [Bascules], 2022), 71, accessible online (our translation).<\/span>\u200a\u2014\u200athat is, a kind of shared vigilance focused on what escapes us, on what often remains imperceptible, buried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Julie$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Julie$
Julie Faubert<\/strong>
Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, 2024-2025, performance,
Cin\u00e9ma Moderne, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photos: Maryse Boyce, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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At the start of the performance, sounds of the space, recorded in advance without an audience, are broadcast in the movie theatre through thirty-four loudspeakers whose potential for spatialization is pushed to the extreme. In part pre-recorded, in part produced live, the work is meticulously composed, choreographed, and played by a few performers who move in the space and between the seats, making movements that are also sonic gestures. They play the theatre as though playing an instrument. Faubert explains that she built the work by \u201cspatial scenes,\u201d by \u201cblocks of sounds that corresponded to a certain way of inhabiting the space of the projection room.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Julie Faubert, email to the authors, July 11, 2025 (our translation).<\/span> A musicality develops, carried by the composition we hear and by the sonic gestures produced around us in the darkness. Some of these are occasionally visible, furtively illuminated by the beam of a single flashlight. Becoming increasingly present and perceptible throughout the performance, these gestures merge with those of the audience and the recordings transmitted through the loudspeakers. They thwart the usual frontal and disembodied relationship with the projection room. The boundary between audience and performers blurs, and listening becomes a shared and reciprocal experience. Instead of supporting a visual credibility, the sounds emphasize a form of collectivity through the materiality of the theatre and lead to a concrete, engaging immersion that demands our attentive co-presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Julie$
Julie Faubert<\/strong>
Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma,<\/em> 2024-2025, performance,
Cin\u00e9ma Moderne, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photo: Maryse Boyce, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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With Faubert, we are examining a category of immersive works that eschew spectacle and an inert or overwhelmed consumption by stimulating our agency; we must choose what to watch or not watch, what to listen to or not listen to, whereas the works remain, to a certain extent, indeterminate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In other words, rather than offering an isolated or individual experience, these productions encourage the audience to perceive the journeys of the other listeners in the space as being part of their own experience. A collective dimension is activated here in the fact that the sensory experience develops only through the co-presence of bodies\u200a\u2014\u200athose of the performers and the audience\u200a\u2014\u200aand their ways of sharing a constantly shifting space. Along the same lines, we can think of the sound installations by the Swiss artist Zimoun, such as 658<\/em> prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 70\u00d770\u00d770cm<\/em> (2017). In this work, the space serves as a multidirectional, rhythmic instrument that transforms the entire room into a vibrating nebula, in which a sense of scale (time and space) is defined through the coexistence of other people and predisposes us to aleatory and communal listening. Such immersive works have the potential to change the relationship with one\u2019s own body, the space, and the other bodies or objects present by displacing, shifting, and remaking the demarcations, contours, and textures of these elements. They become meaningful only through the co-presence of listening bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Zimoun\n658$
Zimoun<\/strong>
658 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 70x70x70cm<\/em>, installation view,
Le Centquatre, Paris, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, the relationship between the place and the people present\u200a\u2014\u200aperformers or audience\u200a\u2014\u200ais determinant. Already, the \u201cnous sommes\u201d (we are) in the title reveals this assembled corporeality and puts it into perspective with the specific venue of the Cin\u00e9ma Moderne. Fascinated by the space of the movie theatre\u200a\u2014\u200awhere, typically, we can \u201cbe sensorially close and experience strong emotions without ever sharing them\u201d^{3<\/sup>^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Julie Faubert, Q&A with the audience at the Cin\u00e9ma Moderne as part of the Uncommon Senses V symposium, Montr\u00e9al, May 7, 2025 (our translation).<\/span>\u2014\u200aFaubert probes, first and foremost through sound, the very nature of image and place. Rather than becoming an integral sound experience, the attention in a projection room is most often directed toward the kinetic light emanating from the screen. This orientation to somewhere else makes us (temporarily) forget our concrete presence, our corporeality as people sitting in a theatre. Faubert\u2019s work inverts this mode by putting the sonic dimension at the forefront and transforming the walls, seats, and floor into sound devices; the visual kinetics of the cinema is thus shifted to the sonic kinetics of the space. In so doing, she breaks apart the screen\u200a-space, stage\u200a-audience, material\u200a-\u200avirtual, passive\u200a-\u200aactive, and live-recorded boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}
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This site-specific work erases the demarcations between place and work and situates listening in an interchange between reality and fiction, performed and pre-recorded. Faubert\u2019s approach evokes the strategies used by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in FOREST (for a thousand years\u2026)<\/em> (2012), a seminal work of collective listening as aesthetic experience. In this sound installation, the natural sounds of the forest are integrated into a sound composition transmitted by thirty-two loudspeakers set up around the audience, in the middle of the same forest. The apparatus deliberately blurs the markers between live and pre-recorded sounds and immerses listeners in a perpetually transforming narration. A forest and a cinema transmuted into a listening space, sculpted by emerging sounds, which, gradually, give rise to a communal attention, in which every person is a fragment of what they are hearing and listening to in a fiction-reality that is sometimes narrative (FOREST<\/em>), sometimes impressionistic (Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em>).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Janet$
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller<\/strong>
FOREST (for a thousand years…)<\/em>, installation view, Kassel, 2012.
\u00a9 Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Photo: courtesy of the artists & Luhring Augustine, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The listening proposed by Faubert, Zimoun, and Cardiff and Miller involves an intimate aspect formed of personal and sensory resonances. It is precisely this perceptual intimacy that Faubert\u2019s work stresses through a shared experience. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy maintains, \u201cTo be listening is to be at the same time<\/em> outside and inside, to be open from <\/em>without and from <\/em>within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other. Listening thus forms the perceptible singularity that bears in the most ostensive way the perceptible or sensitive (aisthetic<\/em>) condition as such: the sharing of an inside\/outside, division and participation, de-connection and contagion.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening<\/em>, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 14.<\/span> We are listening, attentive to the other, but we are also \u201clistening to our listening,\u201d^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Pauline Oliveros quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art<\/em> (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 158.<\/span> considering how we are listening, how we are hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With its physical, intimate, and even sensual dimensions, sound plays a crucial role in the interchange with the space, between the architectural volume and the sonic envelope, and the body becomes its interface. Perception is intensified to a hypersensitivity; the body concentrates on what is happening internally and externally in other ways. From an interdisciplinary and immersive perspective, listening is greatly amplified because the body no longer hears only with the ears: \u201cWe hear with the head, we hear with the stomach, we hear with the feet, we hear with the back\u200a\u2014\u200athe whole body vibrates in the reconstruction of sound,\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Claudine Nougaret, D\u00e9gager l\u2019\u00e9coute<\/em>, 2019, video, 30:19, accessible online (our translation).<\/span> the sound engineer, film director, and producer Claudine Nougaret tells us. The body, therefore, becomes an integral part of the extended instrument of the place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Julie$
Julie Faubert<\/strong>
Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em>, 2024-2025, performance,
Cin\u00e9ma Moderne, Montr\u00e9al, 2024.
Photos: Maryse Boyce, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Julie$ <\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
By making materials audible through touch, merging the borders between pre-recorded sounds and those produced live, and erasing the distinction between body and space without at the same time making them homogeneous or suppressing their agency and without ever lapsing into spectacle, Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma<\/em> exemplifies an immersive work that enables critical thought. Here, the immersion is not what constitutes the aesthetic proposition: it is the aesthetic experience itself that leads to an immersion, which engages us internally while also connecting us to others. Nous sommes au cin\u00e9ma <\/em>is a true aesthetic laboratory that demands our individual and collective attention in order to reassert the value of feeling and perceiving a breath, a scratch, a scrape. Experiencing the political potential of listening and sound by paying attention to what is beyond the subject, what is situated outside the self, is a listening position that encourages connections, opens up new perspectives, and participates in building an inclusive, collective consciousness able to resist assignation and oblivion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are here, at the Cin\u00e9ma Moderne, in a place initially conceived for the image and for an experience that transports us elsewhere. Transformed for the occasion into an all-encompassing sound apparatus, the place immerses us in its own specific characteristics and a unique temporality. We sit in the dark, in a projection room without projection, one beside another being beside another being, our autonomous subjectivities assembled in a common echo chamber. The entire spatial envelope has been converted into an extended instrument, and the performers have stepped outside the frame. Contrary to what the cinematic experience usually offers, we are here together, actively and critically listening, in order to create a collective consciousness as an aesthetic experience.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":273257,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7754],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7766,7758,7756],"artistes":[7789,7791,7805,7853],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-273270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-116-immersion-en","auteurs-caroline-gagne-en","auteurs-magali-babin-en","auteurs-oana-avasilichioaei-en","artistes-george-bures-miller-en","artistes-janet-cardiff-en","artistes-julie-faubert-en","artistes-zimoun-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273270"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273276,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273270\/revisions\/273276"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=273270"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=273270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}