LA TOUR VIVANTE
Sound piece & live performance
2023 – 20′
Directed by Bart Bell & Fanny Rahmouni
La Tour Vivante is a sonic exploration of the Mercuriales towers, two monumental skyscrapers rising on the eastern edge of Paris. Often perceived as silent relics of a modernist future, the towers reveal another presence when one begins to listen.
The piece reconstructs the experience of a night patrol inside the building, using field recordings, voices of security guards and architectural ambiences collected within the towers. Between documentary and fiction, these fragments gradually reveal the hidden life of the structure and the subtle rhythms that inhabit it.
During the performance, voices, atmospheres and sounds are assembled live, following a loose score structured around the different stages of the patrol, from the basement to the rooftop terraces. Each performance becomes a new traversal of the building, where the narrative unfolds primarily through sound.
In this exploration, architecture becomes a living acoustic body. Walls resonate, ventilation murmurs, distant machinery vibrates. The towers begin to whisper their own stories to those willing to listen.
La Tour Vivante operates as a form of reverse cinema, where sound leads the imagination and images emerge through listening. The building itself becomes the instrument, a surface for memory, resonance and sonic fiction.
Credits
Direction
Bart Bell & Fanny Rahmouni
Visual performance
Yonas Le Bris
Video
Quentin Elles
Live video
Marco Juan Lavandier — ZEROZORO
Special thanks
Zohir, Ramdane, Florian
Le Sample
Baptiste Belleudy
Performances
Paris — 21 April 2023
Le Sample (Bagnolet) — 22 September 2023
Radio
Interview featured on “Récréation Sonore”
hosted by Claire Laxtague — Radio Campus
Genesis
Bart Bell and Fanny Rahmouni share a common interest in sound creation. They met at the Mercuriales towers in early 2021.
At that time, the towers were temporarily opened to artists, collectives and associations, who were invited to install their offices there while awaiting a renovation project. They began recording the space, collecting voices, ambiences and architectural sounds until spring 2022, when the towers closed permanently.
In April 2023, the performance La Tour Vivante was presented for the first time in Paris.
A future from the past
Built in the 1970s as part of an ambitious plan to create a new business district in eastern Paris, the Mercuriales towers rise 122 metres above the Porte de Bagnolet.
Today they stand as monuments to a future imagined decades ago, a vision of modernity that has slowly become obsolete. Largely empty for nearly ten years, the towers remain suspended between past and future, waiting for an uncertain renovation project.
It is within this fragile moment, when these seemingly immovable structures appear to waver, that the project finds its starting point.
The poetry of a living space
The Mercuriales towers are alive. Like a living organism, they are traversed by countless movements: those of the people who work inside them, but also those of matter itself – concrete, glass and steel – animated by hundreds of metres of pipes, shafts and infrastructures.
Invisible waves and subtle vibrations run through the building at every moment. It is these movements that we seek to reveal.
Rather than showing the towers or the view from them, the project invites the audience to enter their interior, their hidden depths, and to immerse themselves in the life that pulses beneath the reflective glass surfaces of the façade.
The unseen professions
This exploration is guided by the team, the crew, of the security control room, responsible for ensuring the continuous functioning of these sleeping giants, day and night.
La Tour Vivante gives voice to these guards, shedding light on these often invisible professions and the demanding conditions of their work. Beyond the uniform, the project also seeks to reveal their personal perceptions, their reflections, dreams and moments of contemplation during the long solitary nights spent inside the towers.
In this quiet vigilance, the experience of the night patrol sometimes takes on an almost metaphysical dimension, at the heart of these immense sleeping structures.