SYRINX

Listen/See: Western culture has long isolated if not opposed these two fields of our perceptive life: where the eye objectifies, puts at a distance the world in order to subject it to the rigors of reason, the ear immerses the subject in this same world and if necessary leads to its enchantment. While the view has time, listening must seize the moment in which what is happening to it is due to arise to disappear. We would be wrong to believe this typology unwavering. What we can understand about the hearing of birds overturns the rigidity of such a model: their use of listening seems to combine a dimension active and directional hearing, like sight, and a relative indifference to the sequential traits of rhythm and melody carried by what we perhaps call their song a little lightly. This one is characterized more by the presence of motifs whose temporal order matters little. It is perhaps this enigma of song and of the sound world in general, the one that invades and penetrates us as if to animate us, that the images of Joséphine Michel deploys in the apparently heterogeneous register of the visual. His Photographs of birds most often immediately dismiss the figure or the graces of the whole body, and the myth of the defiance of gravity. They are devote themselves to a form of revelation of these motives that an intimate and singular leads to the confines of abstraction. These are eyes and feathers that we cannot just look at but within which we are suddenly plunged, as if the gaze could lose a moment of its eloquence and to join, through magnetic observation, the passion of listening. As if There was no longer only to decipher, to read, but also to capture, and to let capture. To join together the seizure and the seizure. In a remarkable and daring text, the anthropologist Tim Ingold takes us into a questioning of this all too obvious duality between sight and hearing, duality undoubtedly subject to techniques derived from writing. From the study of sounds of birds, he questions shamanic healing practices, among the Shipibo-Conibo, in eastern Peru, in which an aerial design of being replaces the bodily approach, and where light and song exchange their forms and their ways: ephemeral and radiant figures that are not not to read but to hear.