Rodolphe Alexis

Thanatorium

This recording reflects an ordinary morning in the Brazilian Pantanal. A region of floodable savannah still populated by all the megafauna of South America, the Pantanal is among the largest wetlands in the world.

The sequence plan, written using a “near coincident” stereophonic setup known as “time and intensity” technique or ORTF. This is often used for radio ambiances, making it possible to deliver a sound image that is relatively precise for localizing audio sources while maintaining a feeling of space. This recording, an exosomatic memory artifact rich in dynamic sound events, reflects the diversity and intentionality of living beings who vocalize before going about their daily activities. The auditory archive of the place thus reflects a traffic crossroads of individual trajectories and multiple agentivities. At a collective level it can be felt as exotic as well as reflecting an everyday banality, depending on where you grew up and the culture you come from.

Filtered by the technical determinisms of the tools used, this recording also reflects a culture of listening, a musical sensitivity as well as implicit stereotypes permeating my practice, as an over-represented white cis-gender man, inscribed in a genealogy of techniques of sound inscription shaped on a heritage of the conquest of territory, of the systematic collection still residually not exempt from ethnocentrism, romanticism or essentialism.

However, on an individual and intimate level, this sound spectrum (in the sense of audio spectrum as well as ghost) when it’s re-listened reactivates the sensory and somatic memory of the moment experienced that morning, when a young tapir crossed the river in front of my eyes. In that the recording is engraved in a bygone past, it makes me aware of the time that has passed and is still passing when I listen to it again. By reflecting a fragment of life which moves further and further away from me temporally, this memory acts like any sound archive, by revealing itself in the present and in its aerial propagation and its resonance : it makes us aware of our certain death. In that way, sound recordings are the expression of the bardo. They are neither alive nor dead, and come back to haunt our sensitive memories to bring us closer to the end, in a delicate and disturbing seduction.

In doing so, they reactivate our emotions and re-potentialize us in what remains to be experienced. A recording like this, through its fragmentary testimony of an abundance of diverse and varied lives, brings me the image that I would like to keep at the moment of “passage”: all this animated matter to which the remains of any deceased body, reproducing humus, will help to give life again.

“Thanatorium” as a title refers here to the practices of thanatopraxy of the natural sciences or the techniques of preservation of the body in funeral services and, more specifically, recalls the name of the assisted suicide service presented in Richard Fleischer’s film Soylent Green as a dark mirror of our times.

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