FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

Valérie Vivancos
aka Ocean Viva Silver

photo Romain Charrier

Artist and composer, Valérie Vivancos aka Ocean Viva Silver sailed the Anglo-Saxon artistic and musical undercurrents (Liverpool, Manchester, London, San Francisco, NYC) for 11 years before settling in Paris in 2002. Her practice revolves around composition, improvisation, performance scores, situations and writing protocols that interweave life and fiction and trigger 'curious' experiences. She studied Fine Arts in London and San Francisco (Chelsea, SFAI), English and Sociology in Paris (Sorbonne) and was taught sound arts and electroacoustic composition by David Ryan, Hayley Newman, Laetitia Sonami, Christian Zanesi and Robert Hampson.

She is co-founder of projects focused on experimental music/sound and art including the duo OttoannA and the Double Entendre editions (With Rodolphe Alexis) and often collaborates with other artists (Limpe Fuchs, Jos Smolders, Carl Stone, Kamilya Jubran, Soizic Lebrat, Florence Jou, Claire Filmon...). She has worked with the GRM, Collectif MU, Fair_Play network among other music-related organisations. She also writes and translates poetic, literary, journalistic and theoretical texts (Pompidou Centre, Editions Mego, Ina-GRM, Robot Records, MU asso, Shelter Press, Revue & Corrigée, Editions JOU).

She has run sound/art workshops in Brazil, invited people to sleep in an underground bunker in Denmark, spatialised music in a Planetarium, on a boat sailing the Danube, Improvised a performance with sounding objects in Hong Kong, in a church in Auvergne, created soundtracks for answering machines, cctvs, binaural streams, dance, received commissions for art, electroacoustic and radio pieces, curated deliberately inclusive events.

Her work has been featured in international art centers (Palais de Tokyo, Gaîté Lyrique, Leroy Neiman Gallery, Overgaden gallery, ICA, Barbican Centre, Mudam, Parque das Ruinas, Black Box Theater HK, Musée Réatu, Maison de la Poésie, Le Grand Café...) ; music venues and festivals (Présences Électronique, Présences, Poitiers Planétarium, European Sound Delta, Futura, The Dark Outside, Nuit Blanche, Sonic Dreams, JRM, Le Mans Sonore, Ecotone Bxl, ...); dance and performance centers (CND, Le Silo, Mado Robin, Bertin Poirée, Micadanses, Ri.ves Valcivières), as well as radios (France Culture, France Musique, Rte Lyric, Phaune, Radia Network, Kunstradio, Resonnance FM, Jet FM, Panik, RTBF, Tesla FM, Station Essence, Station-Station, LYL Radio, πnode...) notably hosted by Thomas Baumgartner, Kassel Jaeger (François Bonnet), Kate Carr, Nastasia Hadjadji, Anne Montaron, Jean Yves Leloup , Emmanuelle Jawad... She has received institutional awards, residencies and commissions (GRM, Radio France, France Musique, France Culture, Scam, Gulliver, RTBF, EMS, Harvestworks, SCRIME, Athenor, Le Grand Café, Fondation Michalski).

Oracles 5:23 (2022)
Petrified sound bodies and twisted instruments. Some of the titles came about in dreams. This is a study of the physical and transcendental properties of stone as a compositional material. The processed textures, added to the vocals and electronic layers, unleash the mineral 'soul' of 5000 year old rocks and spirits. As I wandered and explored the ritual uses of stone, I came across the Summstein, a hollowed-out stone intended to create psycho-active auditory effects when one puts one's head inside and hums. Humming (drone) stones are the remains of ancient cults in various parts of the world, including Brittany. The most striking one can be found in the Ħal Saflieni troglodyte temple and burial complex in Malta, which inspired the narrative of this album. With its Neolithic sculpture, the Sleeping Lady, its ochre spiral ornaments and the unique resonances of its Oracle Room, the Maltese Hypogeum triggers a deep image of the distant past in a trance-like state.
A journey from stardust to the womb of the Earth.
From the Album Ħal Saflieni (Tsuku Boshi 2022)

Riddle 06:26 (2024)
3rd movement in Echolatia, an electroacoustic piece in 4 movements released on Mare/Moto in 2014.
All the sounds originate from a single voice recording (made at the GRM studios in 2010). Several layers mix the raw voice with its processed studies.
The compositions were created between 2010 and 2013 as live and radio commissioned pieces, notably for France Musique and Le lieu Multiple (Poitiers).

Summstein 09:57 (2021)
Commissioned by France Musique for Anne Montaron's programme Création Mondiale, composed during a residency at the GRM studios. Summstein is a study of stone as a sound body, and more precisely of these humming stones hollowed out for what is thought to be an ancestral ritual. As you pass your head through the cavity, start to hum, a psychoacoustic experience arises…

Idiorrhythms Part I 20:00 (2023)
"‘Comment vivre ensemble’ (How to Live Together)" is the title of a series of lectures delivered by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France, where he elaborated on the concept of idiorrhythms. Drawing inspiration from the lifestyle of hermits on Mount Athos, who alternated between solitude and moments of communal life, Barthes explores the creation of unique, individual rhythms that coexist without converging into polyrhythms. This notion serves as a kind of structuralist reimagining of sociological questions, translated into the realm of sound creation, where distinct temporalities interact without subsuming one another.
Commissioned by the GRM and composed during a residency at the GRM studios in October 2023
Premiered at the Studio 104 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris on November 5, 2023