[CO S-A]/Corsica Sud Archives: a research-creation-action project based on the reactivation of Corsican music and sound archives
The aim of our contribution is to report on one aspect of the research-creation-action project [CO S-A]1 carried out between January 2022 and February 2023 in Pigna, a Corsican village in the Balagne region.
The village of Pigna is located in the Balagne micro-region, very close to Île Rousse, between Corbara and Sant’Antonino. Since the 1960s, Pigna has gradually become a focal point for the revival of Corsican culture, thanks to the development of ‘reservoirs of solutions’ and the installation of a range of cultural facilities designed, first and foremost, to enhance the value of the region’s specific crafts and, secondly, to promote music through the revival of instrument making. Over the past forty years, Pigna has seen the emergence of numerous initiatives to transmit, disseminate and promote Corsican music. The E Voce di u Cumune music association (founded in 1978) was awarded the Centre National de Création Musicale (CNCM) label by the French Ministry of Culture in 2017.
It is against this backdrop that the [CO S-A] project was conceived, focusing on the development of the Repertorium2 music archive. Digitised from 2010 with the help of the French Ministry of Culture, the Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l’Homme in Aix-en Provence and the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse, this archive is the result of a number of collections initiated in the 1970s by Antoine Massoni3, Nando Acquaviva4, Toni Casalonga5 and Nicole Casalonga6.
The aim of [CO S-A] is to reflect in a collaborative way on the life of the archive after it has been placed in the archive, and is broken down into three areas of research. The first involves creative work based on the reuse of archives from the Repertorium (rewriting, recycling, misappropriation, reinterpretation, improvisation); the second is an archival appraisal of what already exists in order to establish a medium- and long-term policy for the conservation and enhancement of our heritage. Axis 3, for its part, seeks to encourage local action among the village’s residents and users. In collaboration with the craftsmen of the village of Pigna, Caroline Boë – a composer – has devised a sound walk, offering a listening point in front of each craftsmen’s stall in the form of sound pastilles – short compositions – made up of recorded sounds of craftsmen at work mixed with extracts of Balanese heritage music archived in the Repertorium.
The aim of this contribution is to show how the [CO S-A] project carried out in the Pigna area has made it possible to experiment differently with the social, economic and cultural project that has been supported by the village’s inhabitants since the 1960s.
1 Corsica Sud-Archives. Cf. https://cosa.hypotheses.org. 2 https://repertorium.voce.corsica 3 Organ builder. 4 Singer, instrumentalist, composer and teacher. 5 Musician and artist (painter, sculptor, set designer and stage director). 6 Singer, instrumentalist and teacher.
Keywords: musical and sound archives, Corsica, research-creation-action
Biography
Christine Esclapez est professeure de Musicologie à Aix-Marseille Université, membre de l’UMR PRISM UMR 7061. Ses axes de recherche sont profondément marqués par les orientations interdisciplinaires de la musicologie. Actuellement, elle conduit plusieurs projets de recherche autour des interactions entre archives et création en relation avec des structures culturelles. Elle a également réédité plusieurs textes des XXe et XXIe siècles en Esthétique de la musique et développe une réflexion épistémologique sur la recherche-création.
Aix-Marseille Université, PRISM, UMR 7061 (CNRS-AMU) – christine.esclapez@univ-amu.fr