Tania Mouraud. Ear Rooms

Abstract

Working in the early 1970s, Tania Mouraud is among the first figures in Europe who introduced spatial artistic research at the intersection of the environment and sound. For its scope, her research must be situated in a broader context than her impact in France alone. Like that of her contemporaries Vito Acconci, Robert Morris or Bruce Nauman, Mouraud’s collaborations with musicians such as Eliane Radigue, La Monte Young, and Jon Gibson exemplify a spirit of hybridization shared in common with the American neo-avant-gardes. Mouraud’s work above all, highlights a continuous redefinition of the limits between mind and body, inside and outside, subject and object – a research in which the body becomes the preferential territory for rephrasing the relations with the real. This article aims to retrace the course of a research project that, beginning with the ashes of an autodafé, takes the form of a ritual. It goes on to argue that Mouraud’s work is freed from the dualisms related to representation and the forms of institutional knowledge, while also situating the individual in a broader network of relations and within what the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls an “ecology of the perceivable,” suggesting a different capacity of feeling and relating to the world. Mouraud’s “psycho-sensorial” experiences operate through some primordial poetics of space (Bachelard), where space recovers its dwelling state of room. A more suitable dimension to live-in created by the ear, rather than governed by the eye. In Mouraud’s “Inititation Rooms” these distinctions between figure and ground are dismissed, just like the intervals that are necessary to the eye to appropriate its objects.