STONESOUND (Aubry & Saouli, 2019)

« STONESOUND » is a sonic exploration of the rocky environment of Moulay Bouchta, a village in northern Morocco. The video is the result of an experiment in stone sounding: an exploration of stone acoustics and an investigation of the « limits of things not yet known » (Helmreich 2016). Abdeljalil Saouli’s words tell about his relationship with stones, as part of a local history of co-evolution between humans and their environment. Through tapping, the limestone blocks reveal a rich soundscape, somewhere between a lithophone instrument, a sound lab, and a living ecosystem carved by water erosion. Saouli’s comments emerged during conversations between the two artists, in which “sound-in-itself” came to be differentiated with the particularly situated notion of “stonesound”, more attuned to lithic affect and to a relational understanding of sound and listening.