Sonic Investigations team;
Credit: Simon Nicoloso
On Tuesday 2 April 2024, Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg announced the selection of the "Sonic Investigations" for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
The jury for the open call for the curatorial team of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the nineteenth Venice Biennale of Architecture met on Tuesday 19 March 2024 for their second session. The jury selected, among the three shortlisted teams, the project "Sonic Investigations" by Mike Fritsch, Alice Loumeau and Valentin Bansac as the winning proposal to represent Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2025.
According to the jury, the three teams proposed ideas based on a detailed knowledge and pertinent analysis of the Luxembourg territory, while placing it at the heart of contemporary issues and challenges. Following a "rich" and "fruitful" discussion, the jury unanimously selected the project "Sonic Investigations" to design the Luxembourg Pavilion in 2025.
The selected project centred around the acoustic practice of research on the Anthropocene, offering a sensitive exploration of Luxembourg's territory, which cuts across different environments, positions and voices. Kultur | lx added that by reactivating our tendency to listen, the project offers a new prism for understanding the territory, framing at the same time the impact of human activity on our ecosystems.
Kultur | lx noted that the project was chosen for its capacity to raise important contemporary issues related to the production of the built environment, its questioning of our normative apprehension of territories, the well sourced and referenced documentation upon which it draws and its conceptual and curatorial consistency. Its approach to research and design, driven by a desire to experiment and share new tools of understanding the built environment, convinced the jury, who also saw the opportunity to create a rich and positive dialogue around the questions raised about architecture and its related disciplines.
"Sonic investigations is an immersive, joyful and radical suggestion to focus on sound. In contemporary societies saturated with images, sight casts a shadow on other senses, key to fully apprehending the invisible dynamics of our sensitive relationship with territories," noted the curatorial team in their statement. They later added: "As a practical and theoretical research, the project serves as a tool to re-explore the dense territory of Luxembourg where sounds from biological, geological and anthropogenic beings blend into the intertwined soundscape of the Anthropocene".
The curatorial team is composed of: Mike Fritsch, a Luxembourgish architect, urbanist and educator working between Luxembourg and France; Alice Loumeau, a French-Canadian architect, researcher and cartographer; Valentin Bansac, an architect, researcher and photographer from France. In 2022, Alice and Valentin co-initiated MATTERS.xyz, a tentacular collective endeavour that explores new territorial narratives through interdisciplinary alliances and the accumulation of media.
The jury was composed as follows: Maribel Casas, Director of luca – Luxembourg Center for Architecture; Michelle Friederici, President of Ordre des Architectes et des Ingénieurs conseils Luxembourg; Claudine Hemmer, Visual Arts and Architecture Advisor at Luxembourg's Ministry of Culture; Marija Marić, Curator of the Luxembourg Pavilion 2023; Eléonore Mialonier, Project Manager Architecture/Design/Crafts at Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg; Marion Waller, General Director of Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris; Nemanja Zimonjić from Ten Studio, Zürich/Belgrade.
