Tarek Atoui: “That’s one of the powers of sound and one of its advantages as a medium; it allows you to play with reality, to move in and out of it.”
Mahsan: Your journey began with music and your background as a musician. What inspired you to expand your practice into new realms of artistic expression?
Tarek: The motivation to move from music to art came from the fact that I wasn’t trained as a classical musician. So, the ways musicians work, the methods, and techniques of musicians were a bit unfamiliar to me and also hard to grasp somehow because of the notion of virtuosity. I also realized how much time it takes to learn these things. If I wanted to reach the level of excellence of the musicians I admired and the people I was surrounded by, it would take me another lifetime.
But what I was good at, somehow, was working with concepts. The way I could approach composition and make pieces since my early conservatory years studying electroacoustic and sound art was through ideas I had and developing concepts, then struggling to find how I could translate them into sound or a sound piece. With this, I felt closer actually. Even from the beginning, before I moved to music and studied music, I was fascinated by literature growing up in Lebanon, theatre, and then art. When I first arrived in France, the communities I was surrounded by were students from art schools and fine art academies, and then music came.
In a way, there was already this love and fascination with conceptual art and conceptual ideas. That’s how, kind of naturally, sound helped me move towards this. But for me, it wasn’t really about learning an instrument or making music per se.
Mahsan: I didn’t know you were into literature!
Tarek: Yeah, in a modest way, I used to write poetry when I was a teenager. But the funny thing is, when I started making music, I stopped reading.
Mahsan: That’s interesting! I can relate. Though I’m not a musician, I used to read a lot—philosophy and literature have always been a big part of my life and still are. It might sound cliché, but the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. These days, I’m reading less, but my curiosity hasn’t faded. I find it now in the conversations and encounters I have with different people or in the simple things around me, like looking at the sky, trees, or listening to birds. Now, I’m trying to feel art, life, and emotions more deeply rather than intellectualizing them. And with music, I feel like I can connect to that even more, as it lets me experience that depth in a way that feels natural and instinctive.
Mahsan: Moving on to the next question, your experiences and encounters from your music background are still present in some of your works, such as in The Reverse Sessions. Can you tell us more about the story behind this project and how it has evolved over time?
Tarek: Well, let’s say first of all if we want to speak about the presence of music, or why I consider myself a musician somehow, it’s because I love composition. For me composition is a form of architecture, and I love architecture too. And in the pieces and the works I do, before anything, I’m composing. Maybe not in a traditional way or as somebody would make a sound piece, but my installations are first of all compositions. And I see them as spatial composition rather than like works displayed in space.
With this said, The Reverse Sessions came at a transformative moment, a point when I started doing things in the art world, having residencies, and mainly performing in biennales, museums, or art centers. But from performing solo came the project at Documenta 13 in 2012. That was still a series of solo performances. Following this, the idea emerged to start inviting larger ensembles of musicians and work on things that moved me from being solo with the software I was building to being surrounded by big groups of people. It was about extending the practice of computer programming and what I was doing back then on my own.
The Reverse Sessions came after the project at Documenta, where, after collaborating with musicians and creating ensembles, I felt I had the opportunity to collaborate with instrument makers. So, I moved from making instruments on my own with my digital techniques and know-how to expanding the horizon of collaboration and working with instrument makers from different fields who used materials that were unfamiliar to me.
This collaboration happened through the prism of a process I got the chance to start at the Dahlem Museum in Berlin, where I was exploring and visiting for the elaboration of a project with the Berlin Biennale. In an ethnographic museum in Berlin, I stumbled upon a collection of musical instruments from all over the world. They were stored anonymously, with just serial numbers, but no information about their origin, who made them, when, for what purpose, or how they were played. It was a very liberating situation. The burden of sociocultural and historical parameters around these sound devices faded, and maybe there was a possibility to start a new chapter with the disappearance of memory, or at least the opportunity to put history and memory aside and start from scratch.
I invited musician improvisers to the museum to play a selection of instruments they had chosen from the collection. After conducting performances and concerts in the museum over six months, during which musicians came one by one to play solo, I brought them together as an ensemble to perform collectively, with the intention of recording these concerts and using the sounds to reverse-engineer the instruments. The collaboration with the instrument makers happened by me giving them the recordings of these performances and asking them to imagine and build the instruments they heard in the recordings, without seeing any images or knowing where these sound files came from. That was the idea behind The Reverse Sessions, this concept of reverse engineering.
It follows a path different from what I observed as ethnomusicological approach in the museum in Dahlem, where instruments were considered as shapes, forms, and materials that were meant to be studied, not played. If anything was to be played, it was the replica that would be made from the instrument. The instruments were kind of silent within the ethnology museum. Coming from oral culture and oral tradition, I wanted to see how orality could have a place within ethnomusicology. It’s a different, parallel path I propose, in terms of things, but maybe a way of conserving an instrument or keeping it alive, in relation to oral culture and tradition, is to preserve the sound rather than the object. Let the object be transformed by sound through the ages, in relation to the evolution of technique, sensibility, and many other factors that change over time. So that’s The Reverse Sessions: remaking the collection of the Dahlem Museum through the sounds I was listening to.
Mahsan: In your practice, you also experiment with field recording, such as the recordings of harbors in Abu Dhabi, Athens, and Singapore. Let’s discuss your approach to recording, as it’s more of an individual experience as a recordist for you than a scientific one. This reminds me of Pierre Schaeffer, the father of musique concrète, who redefined the possibilities of recorded sound as a compositional material. Can you elaborate on this and the projects you’ve developed from these recordings?
Tarek: Well, recording for me is a craft, you see? Like a know-how that is very specific and that I have great respect for. I’m not a recordist myself; I studied it and practiced it in a very, let’s say, rudimentary way. But I don’t consider the act of taking a microphone or a recorder and walking around with it as really the practice of field recording. I had the honor of working with people who are at the highest level of recording sound, and I was really humbled by the way they do things and what I observed in their work methods and approaches. It’s a very specific and challenging sound field.
Field recording for me, like as coming from musique concrète and sound art, and similar to the approaches of figures like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, composers who used recordings as sound material to create musical works. This made me very sensitive to the technique and attitude deployed to capture a sound. I could also see the differences between recordists: those specialized in recording natural environments, those working in film setups, and those recording from ethnographic or anthropological perspectives. Each approach remaps the relationship of the person recording to the moment, the environment, the situation, and how they invent themselves within a given context.
I was honored and humbled to work with people like Chris Watson, Éric La Casa, and Frédéric Nogray. To see how each of them stepped into a context I was offering and proposing—that’s why the material we collect is very precious and valuable to me, first of all because of them, and then for the possibilities it offers as sound material. But in this, I didn’t want to just make musique concrète like the fathers of electroacoustic and radiophonic music. I was more interested in exploring what happens now with these types of recordings and how we can avoid taking them for granted when it comes to listening to or experiencing them in a concert or installation setting. That’s still something I haven’t totally resolved.
Tarek Atoui and Chris Watson, I/E project, 2015. Photo © Alexandre Guirkinger
Mahsan: We talked about Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète, and you explained how your approach differs while sharing certain similarities. It also got me thinking about pioneers like David Tudor, who built custom electronic setups for live improvisation. I see some parallels with his work in how you explore technology and blend mechanical and electronic elements, but your focus feels so much more contemporary. You go beyond Tudor’s emphasis on electronic experimentation.
Your performances remind me of the unpredictability and chance elements that David Tudor and John Cage explored, but what really stands out in your work is the tactile, inclusive, and culturally rooted experiences you create. It feels like you’re redefining those ideas for a 21st-century audience, especially with the way you weave in social and cultural narratives. Collaborating with diverse communities and focusing on sensory and bodily engagement makes your projects feel unique—challenging traditional ways of producing culture while staying deeply human-centric.
I’m not a music expert, but that’s how I see your approach. Does that resonate with you? Feel free to correct me if I’ve got something wrong.
Tarek: Well, let’s say a lot of what I do draws its power and potential from what sound offers in terms of abstraction and detachment. Although sometimes the context is social, ethnic, cultural, or related to a specific socio-cultural situation, sound allows you to move away from this and to blow it up. For instance, even if I work on Chinese culture and tradition, or now on Atlas culture, the language of sound and music reaches a level of abstraction that enables you to engage with the subject in a much freer way.
Sound doesn’t just address the intellect. It can be documentative, as we spoke about with field recordings, but it can also be very personal, intimate, and psychosomatic. That’s one of the powers of sound and one of its advantages as a medium; it allows you to play with reality, to move in and out of it. Without necessarily making political statements, things can become politicized in their own way, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s like creating something that lets you move forward in today’s world, not necessarily seeking hope, but blending yourself into the present. It’s a form of meditation, like listening to sound, that helps you navigate these dimensions and find yourself in the here and now. That’s a quality I like a lot, and I really enjoy playing with.
The work isn’t always tied to social contexts or historical materials. The projects I pursue now are different in that sense because, first and foremost, I’m in pursuit of sound. Sound brings me to ethnic contexts, industrial contexts, and even contexts related to disability. It’s not inherently human-centric, but sound-centric. Yet, it always circles back to the human—not exclusively, but often. It also brings you back to materials, like rediscovering the essence of wood, pottery, or metal. It allows you to reconsider what modernity and industrialization mean to us. It’s a way of understanding the world and finding value in things that have a different logic from capitalist, visual, or other sensory approaches that shape our understanding of the world. That’s what I’m in pursuit of.
Mahsan: Ah, I see, that’s more sound-centric. When I mentioned “human-centric,” I was referring to the way your art engages with the human experience, particularly through interaction and sensory engagement. Your work redefines what it means to be human-centric, not just by focusing on individuals but by fostering shared experiences that connect people and senses across different contexts. And in that sense, it seems that collaboration plays an important role in your work, as it brings together many people to create something collectively.
Tarek: Yeah! But of course, it traverses the human. I love being in society through this, so yes, there is a return to humanity somehow. It’s maybe a trait of character, I like people, and I like to be in society, so this is how I found my place in it somehow, through this approach and practice.
But also, this is another thing that needs framing, a notion that we often somehow take for granted or simplify: the idea of collaboration. Collaboration is a really nice word, but it’s something that, with time, I started to question within what I do. Am I really collaborating? Especially after doing a lot of projects and working with a lot of musicians and, as I was saying, moving through all these contexts and multilayered projects of diverse natures. I don’t have the feeling that I’m collaborating. Because, when you speak about collaboration, you speak about commitment, like a sustained relationship. And there is a sense of responsibility towards the people you are collaborating with that is very different from the dynamic I’m in. Because what I feel I’m doing, I’m more like a bee that is hovering. And on its way, it makes very nice encounters, generates things, inspires people, shares very precious and memorable moments, but then it moves on to something else.
There is no community per se, in the sense of people you see all the time, with whom you take decisions together, with whom you build together. I feel like I’m also in this a bit lonely, but in a good way. Not lonely as a solitary inside, but lonely in the sense of taking responsibility, taking decisions. And when I say collaboration, it feels like I’m putting myself in the position of responsibility that I don’t assume and that I’m also embarking people on a process of decision-making that I’m the one taking. So, it’s unfair to them and to me.
Therefore, I’m more and more sceptical about this idea of collaboration. There is openness, there is generosity, there is sharing, there is attention and care for sure, but I wouldn’t say people are collaborating. Especially on projects that sometimes take years, that involve tens of people working, from musicians to instrument makers, to curators, to technicians, to a lot of profiles. But these people didn’t form a community at the end of the day. The project happened, it brought them into contact, and they touched each other, maybe staying in touch through this and generating responses I’m unable to measure or quantify. It’s a bit pretentious to say that “I am collaborating”. I’m inviting, I’m hosting, I’m sometimes cooperating, but the idea of collaboration is a bit, sometimes, taken for granted.
Mahsan: How has your nomadic lifestyle shaped your approach to music? Do you see your travels as part of a broader human experience, or is there something more specific that draws you to these journeys?
Tarek: I’m not a nomad anymore, but I used to be, yes. Like twelve or fifteen years ago, I definitely was. I think those years were the ones that shaped my practice. They taught me the most and helped me the most to find my path, at least in terms of how to navigate within the art world.
The nomadic lifestyle was a blessing, a big chance. Although it was a struggle with a Lebanese passport to move freely within the world, and I couldn’t move freely, it was very jittery, conditioned by the realities of visas, applications, and formalities. However, nomadism allowed me to witness the complexity of the world as it is today, and it taught me to have less judgment about things. What it taught me first of all was the importance of populations beyond regimes—like the difference between the people and their government, you know? The difference between a city and its people. The difference between a political tendency and the people living within it.
So, nomadism was really this contact with humanity on a scale that is beyond all these parameters. I got the chance in my nomadism to move west and to move east, and to really see these two poles that nowadays are fighting. At least I could find my position regarding this, which is out of the two and not belonging to any. On the contrary, I was just like this bee, talking and dealing with something else.
That’s the biggest lesson of this: how it shaped my sound, my approach, and the work I do. It’s about bringing openness and flexibility when I do things, adapting to the conditions of places, being less formal, and going with the flow.
Mahsan: The Ground is a project that draws from your many travel experiences, whether through field recordings or the instruments you’ve developed. You’ve exhibited this work in various locations, such as Singapore, the Venice Biennale, and the Bourse de Commerce. Given the different locations and audiences, do you approach each exhibition differently? And how do you activate the instruments in each context?
Tarek: The Ground is a very nice work because it took many forms before finding its final shape. Singapore was an intermediate form, Venice was the final form, and after that, it became what it is today, what it was at the Bourse de Commerce. But let’s say that The Ground is again like a journey, a series of travels into the Pearl River Delta in China, a journey of learning, of seeing things over seven years with my friends at Vitamin Creative Space, just being curious about traditions of instruments, architecture, irrigation, planting, and so many other things I was interested in, and that they were also curious about. This was a journey of discovery.
The Ground as an installation and work is finished, but for me, it’s also kind of unfinished in the sense that The Ground had a sequel, which is The Rain. After exploring string instruments in China and setting up a whole series of other observations, The Rain came as an exploration of Korean percussion traditions. Now, I’m doing The Wind Harvester, an exploration of a wind instrument called the Khên from Southeast Asia, which spans from Vietnam to Japan. It’s a wind instrument found in many cultures, in different shapes, forms, and tunings.
These journeys are very long—The Ground took almost ten years before it arrived at Venice in its final shape. The Rain took five or six, and now The Wind Harvester has already been at least four or five years in the making. What I like about these projects is that they don’t create a method or become systematic; they don’t become a system. They remain open because, sometimes, I start with something and think, “Wow, this is such a big topic.” It’s bigger than just a project, bigger than the attitude of an artist working on something and saying, “Yeah, I know what it is now.” The more I work on these things, the less I know about them! So, I say, “Okay, this is not finished!” You know, field recording or classical or traditional Arabic music, these are things that take a lifetime. So I say, “Keep them open, you never know!”
Mahsan: One of the most unique aspects of your practice is your pedagogical approach, particularly your workshops with diverse groups, including deaf individuals and students of all ages. What motivates you to engage with these communities, and how do these experiences influence your subsequent works?
For instance, your The Whisperers series was inspired by workshops with four- and five-year-old students, where you explored water, vibration, wind, and rotation using everyday classroom objects. What were the aims of these workshops, and what unique experiences or challenges did you encounter while working with this age group?
Tarek: Education, that’s something fundamental and intrinsic to sound projects. As much as I learn from traveling and nomadism, I learn from education. In the beginning, when I graduated and decided to work in sound, I was doing education. But initially, for me, education was another way of finding an audience. It was as rewarding and fulfilling as performing. Giving workshops or working with teenagers brought the same amount of joy and happiness as a very good concert. It was a different way to reach people because it was more direct, and it created another dynamic than just me showing what I do and people receiving it. It was more of a back-and-forth exchange.
With time, especially with the project Within, on sound and deafness, this is where I decided to fully put myself in a situation where I was learning from education. It was an experimental situation, asking, “What if we consider that a deaf person is an expert of sound, the person who is most able to tell us what sound is outside of the ears?” So, I embarked on this journey, giving workshops, but I think I was more taking workshops than giving them. It was a very nice and complex relation of what I take and what I give. But being honest and sincere, I would say: “Ok, I know nothing about your reality or what you struggle with on a daily basis, or what you advocate for, but this is what I advocate for, and what does it mean to you? Does it say anything to you? What can come out of it?” That was the approach of learning from the deaf. At some point, I also started to have things to propose to them, especially when I built these instruments and was able to create performances, seeing that we could play together, make music together, and do things differently from how they were used to interacting. That was the beauty and simplicity of the story: creating platforms and momentum of being together in all simplicity and sincerity.
The experience with the deaf is still an ongoing project because, again, sound and deafness is a very broad topic. It has really shaped my understanding of sound, helped me explore materials and materiality, and influenced projects like The Ground. It’s also shaped many other works I’ve done based on what I learned from this. It’s something I don’t want to end, because I’m still learning from it and am afraid of losing this source of knowledge. But let’s say Within, as a moment of learning through education, really put education at the center of the practice. When I’m doing education, I’m doing research, performance, and many other things with different dynamics and temporalities overlapping.
With The Whisperers, it was also about repeating this gesture: “What about trying to work with kids? What if I bring the things I’ve learned, the topics, and the instruments I created to very young kids?” It was like expanding the audience to one that had a very different understanding of things. Working with four-year-olds was quite refreshing in that sense, because they have no filter and no sense of taboo. They deal with things in such a raw, direct way, with very short attention spans and no technical background at all. It raised questions about how you can simplify without removing depth, how you can make something accessible without losing its soul.
In the case of Within, if you think about concerts where deaf and hearing people play together, and after a while, you don’t know who is who, it opens up new ideas about writing music, making instruments, and creating participatory situations. It’s the same with kids, as working with them reshapes your preconceptions about music, improvisation, and how it’s made. What we often try to do in these situations is make kids sound professional, or make the deaf sound like hearing musicians. But it shouldn’t be about that. If you focus on making it about them, you might end up with something awkward that doesn’t sound great to us as musicians, but for them, it’s amazing. It’s liberating in that sense, and when you reflect on it, you realize there’s so much to learn from them. I’m not discovering or saying anything new. Art naïf and similar genres explore a lot of that. But if you apply this to improvisation, sound, or education, there are definitely things to learn from them that can push you forward. So, yeah, The Whisperers and Within—I don’t know what other projects I have like them, maybe these two!
Mahsan: To me, your projects feel like a living archive of your experiences—not as an artist, musician, sound engineer, or teacher, but as a person deeply engaged in the act of exploring life. That’s why your projects feel ongoing, as you said, because you’re still living them, learning from them, and evolving through them. You’re not here to say you’ve mastered anything, because as humans, can we ever truly master anything?
What stands out is that you don’t confine yourself to a system or a frame. Even when you begin a new project, it carries the traces of everything that came before. Nothing is ever fully “finished.” Your work doesn’t seem like a series of isolated artistic research projects that begin and end. Instead, it feels like your understanding of life, of the world, is continuously present in it—a reflection of the way we live, always searching, always questioning, and never fully arriving.
It reminds me of the formula for how to live, a formula we can never solve. Of course, some aspects of your work, like the technical parts, may require systematic approaches and precision. But the creative essence, the soul of what you create, feels like it comes from your journey as a human being. To me, discovering even a fragment of that unsolvable formula means learning to flow like a river. And you are that river: curious, courageous, and humble, moving forward while always questioning and never claiming to have all the answers.
Maybe I’m going too far in comparing your work to life, and perhaps I’m being too personal and subjective about what I feel in your work. But what moves me most, especially after having this conversation with you, are these very aspects.
Tarek: That’s the fun thing! For me, it’s always been about the journey of learning. Since the day I graduated 20 years ago, it’s been a continuous process of discovery: learning how to make music and sound, how to create artworks, how to sculpt, how to teach, and even how to be a father. People might look at me now and say, “Oh, now he’s doing this,” but really, it’s just someone navigating life through learning.
It’s not about learning something and then simply executing it. That’s not where it comes from at all. To be honest, I didn’t learn much during my studies, and maybe that’s why I eventually moved away from formal teaching. I tried teaching in a university setting but I gave it up because I felt the exchange became too limited, too rarefied.
Tarek Atoui, Standing Waves, Exhibition View Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana, 2024. Photo © Blaž Gutman
Tarek Atoui, Soft Cells Installation View, Standing Wave, Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana, 2024. Photo © Blaž Gutman