Corsin Vogel: Reading Freud... Listening to Freud
The library hosted a sound and visual installation exhibition by Corsin Vogel from November 18th, 2011 to February 17th, 2012.
Corsin Vogel has been working for about twelve years now on sound perception and on the semantic and plastic power of sound matter. His in situ installations explore and experiment with the remarkable sound and acoustic forms of a place, a context or a particular temporal situation. He records sounds that he reworks, changes, distorts and recomposes to create new sound objects that reveal the richness, complexity and the evocative and interpretive power of sound forms and textures.
For his installation exhibition at the Bibliothèque Sigmund Freud, Corsin Vogel takes as his starting-point the recording made by the BBC in London in 1938. This raw material, which is the only known recording of Freud’s voice, has in and of itself a power of fascination and interpretation which the artist seizes upon. One sentence, in particular, uttered in this recording,, summarized very succinctly, his whole life’s work: "[…] I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an international psychoanalytic association […]". On the basis of this sentence, Corsin Vogel opens up a set of representations which he submits to the free appropriation and interpretation of each visitor. A first, visual image of Sigmund Freud’s voice is presented in the library’s window. This transcription evokes the voice and personality of Freud with a materiality and physicality that is all the more troubling in that it remains abstract, resisting an immediate reading, while stimulating interpretation or contemplation. Another image, a sound image this time, of Sigmund Freud’s voice, is waiting to be discovered in the entrance of the library. Though it is very clear and identifiable at first, it becomes increasingly complex; and the reinterpretation of the sound of the voice gradually becomes further removed from the original recording.