Sound for Screenless Eyes

Can a sound biennale produce cinema? At the 2025 Biennale Son in Valais – and its urban counterpart KorSonoR in Geneva – sound installations, performances, and even geology unfold as expanded cinema, transforming valleys, bunkers and dams into unexpected filmic spaces.

can we watch a sound biennale?

If images represent space and cinematic images manipulates time, sounds perform space and time. This is why good cinema-makers take sound seriously: it nourishes cinema with the continuity of space and time.

Is a sound biennale more than a source of inspiration for cinema? Is it already cinema itself? The remarkable number of screens at the 2025 Biennale Son in Valais, and at its urban cousin in Geneva, KorSonoR, would naturally prompt such questions. Can we watch a sound biennale? Should we look at its artworks as forms of expanded cinema? I tried to conduct this experiment: visiting Valais and Geneva with the eye of an expanded cinema-goer. The journey was astonishingly refreshing, the highlight of my autumn. To clarify what kind of expanded cinema I experienced, I will start by putting aside what prevents us from perceiving cinema as generated by sound art.

skipping historical films and the ruins of post-modernism

Co-curator of the Biennale Son, Maxime Guitton, is not afraid to return to history. With Christian Marclay, Peter Liechti, Ben Russell, James Benning, Louis Henderson, Luke Fowler and many others, his “Bouquets Films & Vidéos” certainly have an important didactic value. These films thematise, stage, or simply focus on sound, whereas I am interested in sound (installation, performance) triggering the filmic dimension. In our experience, unlike images, sounds are very difficult to deactivate. Staging sound is probably a subtle way of deactivating it – or deactivating its power.

Instead of films that stage sound, the eye of the expanded cinema-goer would search for sounds that “unstage” film, sounds that deconstruct the theatrical unity of cinema. For this, Jean-Paul Felley and Maxime Guitton’s 2025 Biennale is a house of plenty, insofar as it generously draws on the historical tradition of deconstructive aesthetics – that is, aesthetics that isolate the grammar of the senses and make the syntax of perception explicit. From Marcel Duchamp to John Cage, from Joseph Beuys to Bernard Blistène, passing again and again through John Cage, a historical hub and evergreen reference – see John Armleder’s homage to him or Vincent Barras’ Archives John Cage.

YouTube-educated new generations will learn something important in Valais, something that not so long ago was labelled post-modern. So far, so good. It is always good to return to grammar. For me, all of this has a retro touch, and I prefer to start from the question: What if post-modernism were merely our prehistory? A question that reveals a vision, the uncomfortable vision of a new millennium in which post-modernism becomes an archaeological ruin. In Valais, I have no time for post-modernist lessons.

from sound in film to expanded cinema generated from sound

Not only the historical bouquets of films but any work that places the filmic screen at the centre reveals itself as an obstacle to a truly cinematic experience of sound art. Annika Kahrs’ lovely work Les fanfares (2025) is paradigmatic: the centrality of the screen dictates and reduces the experience of sound and its capacity to create cinema. Even if (or precisely because) sound is the thematic protagonist, it ultimately serves the needs of film projection. If we want to explore how sound generates cinema without being presupposed by, or contained within, a filmic form, we will not find satisfaction in film-centred works such as – chosen because they deserve mention as interesting works per se – Marie Losier’s Felix in Wonderland (also an example of deconstructive aesthetics playing with the beginnings of cinema) or Barking in the Dark, and Gabrielle Löffel’s Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity at KorSonoR.

Also at KorSonoR, the visual environment of two installations seems to offer an initial approach to a genuine cinematic generation directly from sound. A sense of spatial iteration is conveyed in Alexandre Joly and Daniel Zea’s Multiverse of a Birdcage, where the Fonderie Kugler resonates through a new instrument of 17 speaker-panels, a hybrid “acousmonium” interpreted by 41 different artists in a succession of “tales”. Another spatial iteration structures the one-hour dramaturgy of Dimitri de Perrot’s Niemandsland which, beginning with an amusing performative scene of four hands playing electronic music inside a kind of aquarium, proposes a succession of further scenic environments.

For the true emancipation of a screenless cinema generated by sound, we need to integrate imagination as a visual engine. At the Biennale Son, the Pavillon d’écoute by Edition Héros-Limite (Rudy Decelière and Gaia Biaggi, after an initiative by Alain Berset) is perhaps the best opportunity to test how imagination through sound creates a cinematic experience. Described by the artists as a “cinema for the ears”, the listening of stories becomes cinematic thanks to an architecture of isolation and concentration. From this point of view – or of hearing – Lauren Tortil’s re-enactment of a Japanese Listening Bar in Sion has the same potential for a cinematic experience.

concentration and the body as cinematic agents

Is the pénitencier, a bunker in the middle of the Sion castle area, the perfect place of concentration for an imaginative cinema? Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Earwitness Inventory (2018) celebrates imagination by making sound itself the product of imagination. Only the inventory of objects is physically present; their stories coagulate around sounds that become cinematic within the actual rooms of the historical prison.

Is the body the ultimate site of concentration? The path from sound to expanded cinema becomes possible when the body undergoes a synesthetic awakening. No longer merely a form of containment, the body expands through its function of communication with the environment. Exemplary here is Anne Le Troter’s work on (Hyeronimus Capivacci’s) bone conduction: we hear with the teeth, through the solid transmission of sound. This is a “transformative experience”, because it shows how non-metaphorical the body’s resonance with environment and architecture through sound truly is. Two performances at the opening of the Biennale Son made this physical resonance palpable in an unforgettable way: Lara Dâmaso’s Transfers Through Shared Skins and Pierre-Laurent Cassière’s Answers (Tectophony). The latter made the industrial architecture of the Chandoline electric plant (La Centrale, the main Biennale Son venue) elastic, a vibrating organ in the landscape, an airy bunker.

cinema, expanded into geography

From the body to the exhibition space, its architecture, its environment, its geography – this was my path through the Valais Biennale Son. My experience of expanded cinema began with sound and unfolded into the Valais region itself. After noticing the impressive care with which Felley and Guitton installed each work, I quickly understood that this was not an expression of curatorial perfectionism but a necessity. The entire Biennale Son has been conceived as a single site-specific installation – a field of multiple variables. With this intuition, my cinema moved from Eric Hattan’s Unplugged (2024) along a staircase of the Chandoline plant to the Soundwalk Collective’s (Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli) exploration of resonance between the plant and the Mauvoisin dam, or their clever intervention into Jean-Luc Godard’s first film Opération béton (1954), where archival sounds and Godard’s own voice underline sound as the motor of the film. The Biennale site is questioned, played and challenged by several artworks, becoming a breathing organ within the landscape mosaic of Valais. Rossella Biscotti’s The Journey (2023) or Carsten Nicolai’s Ray Collector (2022–2023) expand this geographical involvement beyond regional boundaries, and Alessandro Bosetti’s Location Series (2018) meaningfully plays with the word “here” on a global scale in different languages.

Away from the isolation of the sunny depression of lower Valais, the sound of retreating glaciers provides a cinema that is both local and universal. Camille Llobet’s formally simple film Moraine is unmistakably surpassed by the impressive Impressions du Valais by Julia Borderie and Eloïse Le Gallo which, together with their Aequo (2023), expresses the geological complementarity of oceans and mountains. While another cinematic journey follows Basil Richon’s sea tides (Réminiscence d’une mère, 2024), we travel further to discover the aurora borealis in Sébastian Robert’s interventions or the dramatic transformations of Greenland’s landscapes in the Soundwalk Collective’s imposing work Invisible Landscapes – also in its performative version with Tomoko Sauvage (sound) and Pedro Maia (image).

P.S. There is probably a meteorological secret in this expanded cinema that binds the synesthetic body to architecture, landscape, geography and geology: the circulation of vapours, a materialisation of sound vibrations that unite air, liquid and solid. This is perhaps why my ultimate photographic record of the Biennale Son was Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s Vocal Braid, on which I noted: “a screen that is not a screen; sound for screenless eyes”.