artist
Mélia Roger
France
Work in exhibition and performance 17 June
Mélia Roger (b. 1996, France) is a field recordist and artist engaged to inspire ecological change with environmental and empathic listening. Her work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, searching for the invisible layers between human and non-humans. Coming from a sound engineering background (ENS Louis-Lumière in Paris, ZHdK in Zürich), Mélia is developing a twofold activity between immersive 7.0.2 sound recordings within HAL studio, as well as a more experimental and naturalistic approach to listening. Now at Le Fresnoy (Contemporary Art Studio, France), she is a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of Lille, focusing on the relations between sound arts and acoustic ecology.
Mélia Roger
Intimacy of lichens / Intimacy of stones, 2021
2 channels video installation, headphones
Through tactile microphones attached directly to her hands, Roger amplifies the otherwise imperceptible vibrations encountered when she delicately interacts with lichens, stones, and natural surfaces. This amplified contact reveals hidden sonic ecologies that are normally inaudible, cultivating what Roger terms ‘eco-empathic listening.’
In this two-part video installation Roger examines the ethics of touch, investigating her own presence within sensitive ecological spaces. Filmed during a residency in Brazil, Intimacy of lichens documents her interaction with the fragile lichen, raising issues around the invasiveness of human exploration. By contrast, Intimacy of stones marks a shift in Roger’s approach towards surrender, trust, and acceptance, in which she allows herself to be held by the landscape, dissolving traditional hierarchies between observer and observed.
Roger’s work occupies a liminal, transitional zone. It resonates with the exploration of horizontal relationships among ecological actors, using sound in an intimate reorientation of our perceptual and ethical relationships with the living and the inert.
Mélia Roger
intangible otherness
A lecture-performance about listening through touch
Duration : 30min
With microphones attached to her hands and listening to the amplified touch through headphones, Mélia Roger explores hidden and unheard layers of the landscape. She strokes, touches and feels the roughness of surfaces and carefully listens to the sounds that her touch produces. Inspired by the notion of “in-between”, developed by the sound artist and researcher Salomé Voegelin, the sonic textures created with this technique highlight relations normally existing in void and silence, without any touch.
The point of connection, seemingly a sonic friction, can be explored with care and tenderness, questioning the consent of others – as if the microphones were activating the troubled layer between her hands and the non-human surface. Trying to shift away from an anthropocentric listening position, Mélia Roger offers the term ‘eco-empathic listening’ to address the act of carefully listening to non-human and more-than-human beings: listening to her touching of barks, rocks and leaves, she offers an embodied way to listen to others.
