Petit Bardo

A series of sound works in which artists engage with the act of listening in situations of existential finitude

An invitation to listen to impermanence

“May the moment come when all the sounds of the Bardo are recognised as one’s own sounds.”

Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), or Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State

Artists were invited to create a sound work that could be heard by someone in a situation of existential finitude—within a relatively short span of time—or a work to be heard while someone is dying, or one that the artists themselves would want to hear as they died.

This series of sound works—published every 49 days in reference to Saṃsāra—can be heard with pleasure by all of us, mere mortals, without needing to be in any of those situations, even though in some sense, and in reality, we are inevitably immersed in them.

If, as Roland Barthes observed, “the principal aim of reading might be to experience a little death”, then listening to these sound works could be a Petit Bardo.

In other words, Petit Bardo is an invitation to listen to impermanence.

Artists:

Gregory Whitehead, Artificial Memory Trace (Slavek Kwi), Israel Martínez, dave phillips, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Loren Chasse, John Grzinich, Christopher DeLaurenti, Roel Meelkop, Vicens Vacca, Rodolphe Alexis, Christof Migone, Jeph Jerman, Francisco Meirino, Rudolf Eb.er, Janek Schaefer, Melissa Pons, Mark Vernon, Justin Bennett, Juanjo Palacios, Detachment 九, Marc Hurtado and Brent Gutzeit.