The sound installation How long can a branch bow before it breaks? takes root in the Hambach Forest, in the Rhineland — a once vast primary forest almost entirely destroyed by lignite extraction and transformed into an immense open-pit mine stretching over 53 square kilometres and 300 metres deep.
Several years after the ecological struggles that marked the region, Ida Hiršenfelder
@beepblip and Hugo Lioret returned to listen — to what endures, to what still resists.
Each recording becomes a fragment of a ruined ecosystem, whose electroacoustic transformation produces a recomposed soundscape weaving together geophonic sounds (rain, wind), biophonic traces (birds,
insects), and anthropophonic layers (mining machines).
By combining field recording, transformation, and spatialization,the artists compose a sonic landscape that brings forth the presence of life within the field of devastation.
Their approach echoes Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” (The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015): those practices of attention that, within the ruins of industrial capitalism, teach us to perceive what persists, adapts, and recomposes itself into a paradoxical new nature.
Alongside the three sound installations presented at Même si (The Image Corridor, Solastasis, and Presence), each reflecting a different tension between survival and erasure, resilience and fragility, threat and recomposition, an interactive map of Hambach Forest
allows visitors to listen to and geolocate the field recordings — connecting the installation’s sensory dimension to the situated and
documentary approach at its core.
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Vernissage
20 November 2025 · 6:30-9 pm
Pre-listening
20 November 2025 · 5:30-6:15 pm
(Registration required)
Exhibition
21 November → 9 December 2025
Produced by Même si — Malou éditions
@meme_si_malou_editions
With the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and IReMus (Institute for Research in Musicology, CNRS / Sorbonne University)
@cnrs @lettres_sorbonne