DISORNAMENTS

By Alexis Paul

Interested in sound which I approach from diverse and multiple angles, I like to reveal unexpected melodic potentials using my instrument. In my project “Disornaments”, I am interested in the possible links between textile and sound and the possibility of making embroidery “sing”. I was particularly interested in Palestinian embroideries, for their incredible richness, diversity and narrative power.

To achieve this, I use special music cards, known as barrel organ punch cards. I transform their traditional use by replacing musical notation with the diversity and repetition of the ornaments of Palestinian embroidery, which I perforate by hand. To read these cards, I use a “light organ”: a custom-made machine, inspired by the traditional barrel organ. More precisely, it is a card reader operating by optical sensors and allowing any pattern to be transformed into digital information compatible with a digital sound language. This modern technique gives me the freedom to carry out unique experiments, thereby renewing the principle of the street organ. This system is therefore capable of reading the perforated ornaments and transforming the embroidery into sound tracks. In the void created by the perforation, ghostly and sonorous ornaments then appear.

The way of perforating these boxes, of simplifying the patterns by reducing them to lines, spots and silhouettes, as well as the way in which I approach embroidery has nothing to do with an academic approach. Rather, it is a question of intuitions and poetic gestures, aimed at experimenting with indirect ways of generating sound. I use wooden hammers and metal punches without drafting and I punch directly into the patterns visually. This spontaneous process which remains a personal interpretation allows me to be as close as possible to the act of embroidering both in the slowness and in the freedom of execution. Each original work conveys a variety of substantive and symbolic ideas, ranging from the types of stitches to the meaning of the ornaments, allegories, stories or beliefs they represent. These pieces are an integral part of Palestinian folk art and are incredibly diverse, with floral, geometric and zoomorphic designs. I am particularly captivated by repeating patterns.

Whether the sounds produced can be classified as music or not is of little importance, as my intention is more about the process than the results. The objective is not the literal translation of ornaments into musical composition but the intention which consists of generating sound from a non-musical object, carrying within it a narrative and poetic totality. An attempt to find imaginary connections between embroidery and sound. The project does not aim for any short or medium term results but strives to remain in movement and relationship, to evolve through encounters and experiences. Passionate about the discovery of meaning in these pieces beyond their aesthetic side, I seek to give voice to certain cultures which have little of it, to give them a different look, which would change the perspective or approach of a certain cultural paradigm.

Finally, a parallel objective is also to circumvent the standardization of machines and computer-assisted music by bringing back “diversity”. Thus, using cardboard perforated with Palestinian motifs, I try to imagine an “electronic folk object”, a “folk synthesizer”, which could, like a traditional instrument, deploy a narrative framework, a specific richness, completely absent from the modern electronic instruments.

The Disornaments project was supported by the French Institute of Paris in the form of a research grant, which led me to spend two months in Palestine in the winter of 2023, where I received logistical support from the Al Ma’ Foundation. mal and the France institutes in Jerusalem and Ramallah.