Damien Marchal

Damien Marchal is a plastic artist interested in areas involving sound.
Sound as symbol. In the series where action takes over, Follow the drinkin’ gou’d is a piece paying tribute to slaves, where sheets of glass are struck to the beat of spirituals until they explode. For GARBAGE TRUCK BOMB, le bombardier du pauvre,1 a re-interpretation of a terrorist attack, sound lets us hear the action taken by the visitor activating the system by way of his cell phone.
Sound as apparition. For the series Le fantôme de l’espace obsédant 2 Damien Marchal studies the acoustics of the medium (paper, linen cloth, or cement) and brings forth his “own frequencies”. For the series La connaissance par l’obstacle, 3 the detonation reveals invisible architectural spaces of geopolitical actuality.
Sound as action. In his performances, the artist uses the voice as much as computer machines originally designed to produce imagery (plotters, printers) and hijacks these images to turn them into the scores for his performances: Pearl stylus pro color, Umdeutung der WALKÜREN.
Sound as language. Traduction des accords, the latest project developed at the UN in Geneva for 2017. The multilingualism used at the United Nations will be the area of understanding between what thinking permits and what words reveal, in a place where diplomacy and strategy are disguised in words. A tentacular project bringing together several art centres, each one associated with a medium of the external artistic partners. In each one of Damien Marshal’s projects, sound is a springboard linked to a context, the media serve the idea4, and in each case the artist invites and delegates to others key elements of the work, in consideration of the fact that sound is emitted and received by two distinct operations.

1-Title borrowed from Mike Davis, in Petite histoire de la voiture piégée, Zones, Paris, 2006.
2-Title borrowed from Henri Bergson, in Essai sur les donées immediates de la conscience, Félix Alcan, Paris, 1889.
3-Title borrowed from Gaston Bachelard, in La Formation de l’esprit scientifique, Vrin, Paris, 1938.
4-The Medium Is the Message, pour comprendre les medias, Seuil, coll. Points, 1968.