LÉTOURNEAU, Éric (see also MUON, Benjamin)

Standard III (in the Fado series FIVE HOLES: Listen!)
discussion with curator Paul Couillard
Thursday, October 21 9:30 pm
XPACE

FIVE HOLES: Listen! is a series curated by Paul Couillard for Fado, that examines the significance of the body and the senses. Listen!, the fourth installment in the series, focuses on the sense of hearing. Five projects featuring artists from Canada and the United States explore various implications of the process of listening through gestures, manoeuvres, and interventions into the physical, emotional, social, political and spiritual fabric of everyday life. Two of these projects, Standard III by Éric Létourneau and Untitled (Selected Hearing) by Erika DeFreitas, are presented in the context of this year’s festival.

The “manoeuvre” Standard III began as a two-hour uninterrupted nationwide broadcast on Radio-Canada on April 11, 2004 (Easter). The program featured 198 30-second periods of radio silence punctuated by an alphabetical listing of every country in the world. The same phrase introduced each silence: “Thirty seconds of silence for domestic and foreign political victims…” This broadcast was recorded live off the airwaves and remixed for publication on CD along with a text that considers the effects of administrative regulation and state control on mass media.

Beginning in October 2004, copies of the publication will be sent through diplomatic channels to each country of the world. On the occasion of each country’s national celebration, its head of state will be contacted to verify the receipt and subsequent response to the CD. This process will be recorded on the websites of Fado Performance Inc. and Systeme Minuit.

Éric Létourneau has been active since the 1980s as an intermedia artist and a sono-temporal architect. He pursues an artistic practice based on the creation of situations within the social fabric. He has produced roughly 50 contextual works and has presented his work in more than 10 countries. He is particularly interested in the instrumentalization of collective memory by institutions.

FADO’s project page for FIVE HOLES: Listen!
FADO’s artist page for Éric Létourneau