Synopsis
This documentary is the result of a two-year encounter with the Dominicans Brothers of Toulouse. To begin with, I had to create a way to visit their historical Jacobin Convent via sound alone, since they had lost access to it. I then discovered their research with Marcel Péres, musicologist and composer, through which they reappropriated ancient techniques of liturgical chant, forgotten with their departure from the Jacobins Convent. I then thought of a form of writing between documentary and sound creation telling the quest of these Dominican friars to find the sonic use of a place that had been emptied.
A word from Tënk
Une quête tells the story of a long-term body of work carried out by a group of Dominican friars in the Chapelle des Jacobins in Toulouse, France. Over the course of this research project, the monks meticulously retrace the source of Gregorian chanting and try to delve into the techniques initially developed by their distant ancestors. They’re accompanied by a master of the subject, Marcel Péres.
Benoit Bories focuses in on this quest to unveil the depths of the voice: what it can express, today in the 21st century, in a civilization so far removed from the one under study. It’s both a practical document, the friars studying and surveying, discussing and projecting their voices into the era in which their art and liturgical practices were founded, and a stunning sonic composition, where auteur Benoit Bories takes this mysterious vocal material and tries in his turn to understand its profound language with his own codes drawn from sonic and electro-acoustic art.
Daniel Capeille
Sound recordist, sound designer and sound editor
