Sound is certainly in the air: after Luxembourg sent to the 60th Biennale Arte in Venice, another sonic project is headed to the 19th Biennale Architettura--aka Architecture Biennale--in 2025. Following Kultur|LX’s call for entries to design the Luxembourg pavilion, a jury has chosen “Sonic Investigations” by Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau and Valentin Bansac.

Discovering terrain via sound

“Centred around the acoustic practice of research on the Anthropocene, [the project] offers a sensitive exploration of Luxembourg’s territory, which cuts across different environments, positions and voices,” . “By reactivating our tendency to listen, it offers a new prism for understanding the territory, framing at the same time, the impact of human activity on our ecosystems.”

“Sonic Investigations is an immersive, joyful and radical suggestion to focus on sound,” say the curatorial team in the same article. “In contemporary societies saturated with images, sight casts a shadow on other senses, key to fully apprehending the invisible dynamics of our sensitive relationship with territories. Following John Cage’s silent song 4’33’’, it is a proposal to close our eyes and actively listen. As a counter-project to the hegemony of images, the act of listening offers new possibilities to explore the built and natural environments and shift our focus towards giving voices to more-than-human agencies.”

The authors of the project thus propose to rediscover the territory of Luxembourg through the sound of biological, geological and anthropic entities that mix with that of the Anthropocene. “Through listening, a new uncanny experience of space offers to reveal more than what we see as an opportunity to foster new thinking and sensorial approaches to architectural practices,” they say.

“The project was chosen for capacity to raise important contemporary issues related to the production of the built environment,” says Kultur|LX, “its questioning of our normative apprehension of territories, well sourced and referenced documentation it draws on as well as its conceptual and curatorial consistency.”

“Its approach to research and design, driven by a desire to experiment and share new tools of understanding the built environment, convinced the jury, who also saw the opportunity to create a rich and positive dialogue around the questions raised about architecture and its related disciplines.”

About the authors

Fritsch is Luxembourgish, Loumeau French-Canadian and Bansac French, but all are architects who are additionally involved in research or teaching; and all three studied at OMA in Rotterdam.

This article in Paperjam. It has been translate and edited for Delano.