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Dominique Petitgand

Press release

Dominique Petitgand "Someone On the Ground" Sound installation for seven speakers with subtitles December 2, 2006 - January 20, 2007

"Since 1992, Dominique Petitgand has been producing sound works using voices, silence, noises and music as elements of a montage that create micro universes where ambiguity exists in perpetuity, caught between a notion of reality (recordings of people talking about themselves) and a projection into dreamlike fiction that’s out of context and out of time.

Here is a mental space in which repetition and wavering identities, and places and temporal structures, all evoke the very act of creating a memory. Petitgand’s works are distributed via disk and concert, but also through specialized installations. He recently introduced principles of translation - using a montage of sound and text or through the introduction of a translator’s voice - that produce new perspectives and reverberating effects at the heart of the stories."

François Piron

"The sound installation Someone On the Ground doesn’t have a length, and it plays with the perception of time. The piece can be heard at different temporalities: the visitor discovers each part one after the other (the crash of chairs, the voices, the wind), with different layers, and different versions. When the listener detects the layers, something is revealed.

Someone On the Ground is a kind of spiral that creates an illusion of repetition but never starts at the same place. It consists of linked fragments and paragraphs (that vary after sharing the same beginning) that repeat, change and shift. As is often the case, silence (blanks, voids) structures, breaks, unites or gives rhythm to everything else.

Someone On the Ground presents an unfilled story—incomplete, broken up, and enigmatic—that takes form around an absence. We know we are witnessing something, we know that something is happening, but we don’t know what. We have to make due with the little that we’ve got."

Dominique Petitgand, 2006

Acknowledgements: Hervé Birolini for the DVD production; Miles Hankin for the translation; and Marie Vachette for the video subtitles.

Exhibition views