A journey through sound, memory, and landscapes, questioning the origins, perception, and cultural implications of music.

A lifelong relation to sound and music underlies Latifa Echakhch’s work. On the occasion of her representation of the Swiss Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, she has edited a volume on sound, memory, and perception. In the book, images of her installation in the Swiss Pavilion, The Concert, accompany her own writings along with this by Alexandre Babel and Francesco Stocchi, the co-curators of the pavilion. The volume also includes interviews with and collected texts by François J. Bonnet, Emanuele Quinz, Maxime Guitton, Alvin Curran, Salomé Voegelin, Antoine Chessex, Jonathan Sterne, Juliette Volcler, and Raphaël Brunner. Confronting knowledge, reflection, and intuition, their combined concert of thoughts confirms how sound and music—and their absence—play a crucial role in our physical and cultural perception of the world, and how they allow us to expand our bodily and cognitive experience.

This book is one of the three parts of the Swiss Pavilion; the other two are the installation and a vinyl edition of the piece composed by Alexandre Babel.

Latifa Echakhch lives and works in Vevey and Martigny, Switzerland. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure d’arts in Cergy-Pontoise and the École nationale des beaux-arts in Lyon. The galleries representing her include kamel mennour (Paris and London), kaufmann repetto (Milan and New York), Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv/Brussels), and Pace (New York). She took part in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2011 and was awarded the Prix Marcel-Duchamp in 2013 and the Zurich Art Prize in 2015.