Voice of Fragments : Making memories out of a difficult heritage – Festival ProPhilia

Conceived as part of the PhD Lab at the XR2C2 research and creation center, the project aims to make research into a "difficult" and sensitive heritage shareable, while respecting its protection, mediation and confidentiality regimes.

The installation stages the trajectory of an imaginary researcher who approaches a monumental archive material, "out of the ordinary", part of whose audiovisual traces are destined to remain under institutional secrecy for decades. This imposed distance is not an obstacle: it becomes the very material of the work. Rather than "showing" the archive, Voices of Fragments aims to reveal its contours - its thresholds, its procedures, its mediations - and to make perceptible the often invisible work of those who handle it, classify it and make it available for consultation.

The sound score consists of 411 audio fragments, averaging 13 seconds in length, derived from interviews with archivists and young researchers who attended the hearings. These voices do not deliver a linear narrative: they appear as bursts, rhythms, breaths, lexicons, hesitations. Their juxtaposition creates a memory in fragments, where understanding is never given in a single block, but is constructed by approach, cross-referencing and resonance.

Technically, a generative, spatialized sound composition interacts with the movement of visitors, producing an experience that is both intimate and collective. At the periphery, a halo of whispered phrases remains deliberately indistinct: speech is there, but ungraspable. As you move closer, certain snippets become more legible, as if listening were gradually gaining in definition. In this way, everyone can regulate their exposure: moving forward to seek meaning, moving back to regain a protective distance.

The visual device extends this logic of thresholds. Multi-screen projections present different views of a complex 3D object, like a faceted prism: a work table, partially legible documents, material clues that evoke research without revealing confidential content. Added to this "archivist's table" are 3D scans of archivists' work tools (notes, badges, etc.): archives of lived experience. These modest objects - traces of a gesture, a presence, a day's work - shift attention to the archive as practice, as relationship, as care.

In the center, a wide-angle infrared camera analyzes positions and behaviors to trigger events and orchestrate interactions. If several people enter the installation, their trajectories give rise to superimposed narratives: a multiperspectival sound mosaic in which the collective influences intensity and legibility. The work becomes a space of sensitive cohabitation: we listen with others, but also because of others, and sometimes in spite of others. Voices of Fragments thus questions the fabrication of memory: how an event becomes an archive, then a heritage, then a collective narrative - and at what emotional, political and ethical cost. Working "by scale", the installation seeks neither the spectacular nor the reconstitution; it proposes a form of graduated attention, where distance is a responsibility as much as a choice. Between research, listening and scenography, the project opens up a poetic space for inhabiting a difficult heritage without reducing it, and for transforming fragments of voice into shared experience.