Alcôve Alisa Carroll

Notre Dame + Centre Pompidou

By placing listening devices on the surfaces of built and natural monuments, artist Bill Fontana captures uncanny natural music that reveals that these bodies are alive with sound. Fontana’s latest project amplifies the voice of Notre Dame. Since the devastating fire of 2019, the ringing of the cathedral's bells has ceased. To create his new work, Silent Echoes, Fontana attached sensors designed to detect vibrations to each of the ten bells of Notre Dame. As the bells reverberate in response to the ambient sounds of Paris the live feed is transmitted to a series of speakers at the Centre Pompidou, creating a haunting, immersive sound sculpture. In this episode, Alcôve's Alisa Carroll interviews Fontana in San Francisco, and very special guest Davia Nelson of The Kitchen Sisters meets with Fontana in Paris.

A disc of light, an object of worship, a portal in the vault of night. The moon has always opened up infinite fields of perception, and in a new Hammer Museum exhibition, Drawing Down the Moon, curator and scholar Allegra Pesenti enters those many realms. In our wide-ranging conversation with Pesenti, she traces lunar iconography from across centuries and cultures, expressing the moon’s many aspects: mythical, magical, theological, scientific. Through her scholarship, we encounter Thessalian witches and modern Wiccans, Victor Hugo and 19th century astronomy, and discuss the work of “making the invisible visible.”

In this time of sea change, many curators and artists, writers and journalists are turning their gaze to the ocean. From its depiction as a site of the sublime and the brutal in John Akomfrah’s film, Vertigo Sea, to its lyrical treatment in Sirène, the journal devoted to life governed by the pull of the tide, the sea is at the forefront of our cultural consciousness. At the
Musée de la Vie Romantique in Paris, director Gaëlle Rio curated Tempêtes et Naufrages | Storms and Shipwrecks, an exhibition devoted to depictions of the ocean in the art of the 19th century. In this 10 minute episode, Rio shares how turbulent, luminous marine landscapes by Girodet and Vernet, Feyen-Perrin and Hugo, are ultimately projections of the human soul.

The Fontevristes, a monastic order led by women for 700 years, began in the medieval landscape of the Loire Valley. The great stone abbey was completed in twelfth century, and still stands in western France, a repository of centuries of meditation, prayer, and art. Today, Fontevraud Abbey is a secular center for art and culture, but historic voices still resonate within its walls. We talk with Director Martin Morillon, cultural mediator Zoé Wozniak, and contemporary artist François Réau about the spiritual and aesthetic atmosphere of this sacred space. Walk with us through garden, cloister, church, and crypt as we retrace the footsteps of the holy women of Fontevraud.

On the first episode of Alcôve, we enter into Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature | Museum of Hunting and Nature, one of the most transportive spaces in Paris. Dedicated, uniquely, both to art and conservation, it is an aesthetic exploration of our relationship to nature and the wild. The episode features an immersive interview with the visionary at the center of the museum, Claude d’Anthenaise. As director and curator from 1998 to 2019, he shaped a space where ancient and modern breathe the same air, and and where artists and musicians, ecologists and witches gather to explore ideas inspired by the natural world. thealcoveproject.com | @thealcoveproject