Mette Edvardsen, Iben Edvardsen, Livre d’images sans images, 2024

Livre d’images sans images by Mette Edvardsen & Iben Edvardsen-a mother-daughter collaboration-borrows its title from a series of short stories by Andersen, published in Italy under the title Dialogues with the Moon. Each tale is a small scene the moon has seen during the night on its journey around the world, described to a painter who will turn it into an image. For Mette Edvardsen, “this conversation, in the original meaning of the word conversatio-onis or ‘coming together,’ was the starting point of the work. Using meteorology as a dramaturgical thread (“the moon did not show up every night, sometimes a cloud intruded”), we created and collected materials from our conversations in the form of recordings, texts, voices, drawings, suggestions. We assembled the images, free connections and inspirations in the order in which they appeared to us. They are both sources and traces, material and support for new imaginations or events to come.” The disc, approached projectually by Edvardsen as if it were a book, contains on one side – one side – the incipit of the book Livre d’images sans images read by Iben Edvardsen, field recordings (the low-frequency sounds of bats recorded by a homemade bat-detector) concrete sounds (that of markers running across paper), the first sound recordings of the human voice made in the mid-nineteenth century with the phonautograph (before Edison invented the phonograph) and similar experiments, sounds from nearby rooms, words and concepts, lists of images. Engraved on the other side – other side – is an attempt to capture the sound of a room in its simplicity: an acoustic presence to be accompanied by as inadvertently.

Listen to the excerpt