SO! Amplifies: Anne Le Troter’s “Bulleted List”

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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Nestled deep in a corner of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, Anne Le Troter’s sound piece “Bulleted List” invites the museum’s visitors to explore the social similarities that people verbally express in response to cold calls. Le Troter’s first solo show to be on display in Paris, the work invites the audience to sit inside a modified cinema amphitheater as the sounds of recorded people answering survey queries echo throughout the sloped room. The seating arrangement inside the exhibition mirrors the cubicle-style setup of a call center, though each “station” consists solely of an outline designating where to sit and a coordinating amplifier. Both the questions and answers in the sound piece are produced by real survey callers; each voice sounds polished, poised and mechanized from years of vocal experience, revealing the automated nature that comes with the territory of making a scripted call. The result of each recorded voice unto the listener is akin to standing in the center of a symphony, with vocal patterns as punctuated as a visual, typographic list.

At the Palais de Tokyo I set up a play of light, a new element in my work, which gives visitors a time reference, even if they arrive half way through. Each broadcast is incidentally interspersed with a long silence to emphasize the idea of a session. This determines the attention span given to a work. The collective listening situation I find especially interesting because it reveals a set of patterns of behaviour, a whole language of bodies and eyes between the spectators. These micro-actions, just like the mental paratext of visitors and pollsters (those words that are not uttered but which ring out in our heads when we think or write), swell the work.  –Anne Le Troter, interview with Raphael Brunel

Still of Anne Le Troter’s “Bulleted List” at the Palais de Tokyo, image by author

The progression of sounds in the exhibition follow a distinct, if not choppy routine, with a clearly enunciated polling question asked — “What is your relationship status?” for example — followed by equally simplistic answers — “widowed,” “married” and “couple,” to note a few.   Reflective of the exhibition’s timely concurrence with the French presidential election, each of the questions asked in the sound piece culminates in a political questionnaire, with the same questions and answers being traded back and forth between people in all areas of the political spectrum — indicating that there are fewer differences between the various polling demographics and how they express their opinions than what appears at first glance.

“Bulleted List” opened at the Palais de Tokyo on Feb. 3, 2017, and will close on May 8.

Anne Le Troter was born in 1985 and currently lives in Paris. She graduated from the Geneva School of Art and Design in 2012, and her first solo shows were held at the Arnaud Deschin Gallery (Paris, 2016), BF15 (Lyon, 2015), Espace Crosnier (Geneva, 2015) and Espace Quark (Geneva, 2014). In 2016, she was awarded the Grand Prix at the 61st Salon de Montrouge.

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Featured Image: Still of Anne Le Troter’s “Bulleted List” taken by the author

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Shauna Bahssin is a sophomore at Binghamton University who double-majors in English and art history. She currently serves as the copy desk chief for the student newspaper, Pipe Dream, and has written for its news and arts and culture sections in the past. Outside of the paper, she is involved with the university’s fundraising initiatives through the Binghamton Telefund, and she hopes to work within the field of arts development and advancement after she graduates.

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