Paper short abstract:

Considering that our bodies resonate with sounds, and that sound environments are what make us move, live and evolve, in the context of migration, I wonder how migrants adapt to the new soundscapes they encounter. What can they perceive in the new worlds they arrive in?

Paper long abstract:

For the last 10 years, my ethnographical research is based on performance & narrative apparatuses. For Sounding Bodies, I developed an experimental research program for migrant children staying at a Red Cross shelter in Paris.

Throughout a series of workshops, I invited them to collect sounds. I then conceived an apparatus for motion sensors to play [with] and perform soundscapes. What kind of sounds have they collected? And how did their body manifest a soundscape?

Two concepts will be at work in my proposal: The one of cosmophanies, described by Augustin Berque, and the other of ethnoscapes, defined by Arjun Appadurai.

The word cosmophany refers to the Greek Cosmos and to the verb φαίνω (phainò), which means: "to manifest, to appear, to be obvious". Related to the act of migration, ethnoscapes are those landscapes that migrants recompose with their communities.

If, to every individual corresponds a way of seeing, and ethnoscapes are formed by moving groups, how do people resonate with sounds? Resonate in the sense of moving, playing, acting, making decisions throughout one's life. And how to transmit sound perception? In other words, how can we imagine designing a sound environment for a better future?

My idea would be to postulate new forms of soundscapes, as spaces of repair or spaces of mediation between the world migrants are entering and the one, they have left. My argument is based on the fact that perception is a cultural process, which we can learn and pass on.