Cécile Le Talec par Léa Bismuth

Cécile Le Talec is both an explorer and an experimenter. For over thirty years, she has travelled, filmed, recorded, and modelled materials to reveal their incredible and never-before heard, seen or perceived capacities. For her, it is about “inventing a treasure”. Consequently, the artistic act becomes an adventure, a discovery of invisible passages between forms and meanings. It all started in the early 1990s at the Centre Saint Charles in Paris (currently the École des Arts at the Sorbonne), which in those years was a true learning laboratory, where the artist discovered the works of Iannis Xenakis and John Cage, among others, while studying Asian arts and anthropology. This multidisciplinary connection would never leave her and would fuel her research on sound and sculptural matter, both in their visual and temporal forms.

Through a multiplicity of forms, the artist’s approach is based on the synesthetic faculty to transfer energies from one sense to another, but also from one medium to another. The concern here resides in the mediumistic quality of a raw material, its sensory charge, measurable according to the degree of transmission it contains and the way in which it can shift: sound becomes image, language becomes music, and space becomes experience. Cécile Le Talec likes to talk about “impossible equivalences” whenever scenery becomes acoustic, or in the case of linguistic transcriptions. The use of the term mediumistic allows one to highlight the plasticity of artistic ways of being, their mutations from one medium to another — much like intercessor shamanic rituals, which flow freely between worlds and states of matter.

Most of her work consists in giving visibility to vibrating and acoustic matter, be it birdsong or musical frequencies. Pushing this reflection further led the artist to venture into the ethnographic field in the early 2000s, looking for whistled languages — a linguistic practice used by 48 communities worldwide and listed as intangible heritage by UNESCO. When Cécile Le Talec discovered this mode of communication, she was able to develop the relation between language, speech and musicality in plastic form. This would lead to extensive travelling to encounter nonverbal languages in harmony with their environment: Canary Islands (La Gomera), Mexico (State of Oaxaca), China (Guizhou Province), Japan (Naruto), Morocco (High Atlas), Siberia (Republic of Tuva), and India.

The word partition (sheet music, in French) embodies the backbone of her work in that it most accurately captures the idea of a written and drawn transcription of music. On the various staves that compose it, an infinite field of possibilities stretches out, thwarting the limits of the paper to expand space boundlessly. And so Cécile Le Talec creates partition-drawings with pen and ink for symphonies never to be played, but which carry within them the orchestral power of an entire imaginary world of strings and breaths, high-pitched and deep sounds, chords and dissonances. Some of her video pieces push this logic even further: in Fugue – les claviers [Fugue – The Keyboards, 2014], a pianist’s hands, coated in white paint, play tunes by Bach, Ravel and Reich on a ghost piano and in the process leave behind traces of their playing on a dark background. The rhythm becomes dripping. The sheet music is thus shown in negative and in motion.

Panoramique polyphonique [Polyphonic panoramic, 2011] is a pivotal work in the artist’s career. Created for the International Tapestry Centre in Aubusson, this human-scale installation invites visitors to enter a world filled with birdsong and whistled words, the presence of which manifests both in auditory and visual form, where the work becomes a woven spectrographic landscape. By creating the first sound tapestry in the world, she subtly pays homage to the birds depicted on tapestries since the 16th century, while offering a listening experience through the centuries. Her position here is fundamentally environmental, in that it takes into account the environment, as well as the enmeshment of species and the symbiotic interlacing that enables life to sustain itself.

Walking through the forest in the Sologne where she lives, the artist also listens to the flowers growing and strikes up genuine conversations with the rocks she meets. By studying their veins, their reliefs and their asperities, and through the use of spectrograms, she gives them a voice. The entire landscape becomes a listening surface and an acoustic journey. These rocks bring to mind the traditional Japanese art of Suiseki, stones shaped by water and time into symbolic worlds in their own right. Likewise, Japan was also where Cécile Le Talec made Vortex Sound (2015), in which the sea is the central and swirling actor: filmed in Naruto, the ocean sings, eructs, and whistles like an untameable and impetuous musical instrument, pulling us into its maelstrom. In this instance, it is the incantatory power and violence of the elements that pulls the artist into the vortex, “into the eardrum of the whirlpool”, in search of the “voice of the Pacific”, as she puts it — much like her latest film, shot at the Pesquiers salina in Hyères (Crystal Rhapsodie, 2025), in which the watery, saline surface of the Earth becomes a vast abstract canvas of crystallised convolutions.

In fact, the floor can also become the scene of a vast partition. This was the undertaking behind the installation Partitions silencieuses [Silent sheet music, 2020], a site-specific piece made to stand under the large glass roof of the Tanneries art centre. This time, the inspiration for the piece were the Berber ornamental and geometric patterns produced by female weavers of the Moroccan High Atlas. These patterns are also said to constitute a secret language, the tradition of which has been maintained by women throughout the generations. A coded language unfurls on a vast expanse of white sand (50 m long by 5 m wide), with pictograms appearing in vine black pigment. All around it, unidentified acoustic matter captured through recordings serves as a basis for the composition. At the intersection of language, writing and music scoring, there is this weaving considered as text, in the sense of a fabric of meanings that possesses its own form. It was only natural that what should ensue was a rug woven by those same communities of Berber women, which was presented at the Quadrilatère art centre in Beauvais: visitors were invited to experience the work by lying down on the mass of plush wool and listening to the sound that emanated from the pulsating surface.

In her latest works (presented in Dubai in 2026 at the ? Gallery), weaving takes on a cosmic dimension, seeking to establish an equivalence between the patterns of the Berber rugs and the map of the sky: using the same poetic and synoptic approach, Cécile Le Talec proposes a composition made up of nine constellations named after birds. The constellation of the Eagle, most notably, spreads its wings between her hands, palms outstretched toward the celestial vault.

Yet another correlation that magnifies reality without exalting it; that is, by remaining as close as possible to the users of the world’s great vibrating score.