For immersive headset or gallery, desert sound, and voice. Commissioned by Silvia Valisa at Florida State University; text read by Chantal Dumas. Coding by Kevin Sweet. This sound installation uses many sounds from freesound.org: for the full list, see http://www.betseybiggs.org/souf-credits.
Souf is an immersive sound installation exploring the life of the Swiss-Russian writer Isabelle Eberhardt — an anarchist, cross-dresser, cultural nomad, and Sufi adept who converted to Islam and spent most of her adult life traversing the Sahara alone on horseback while surviving political intrigue, assassination attempts, and a star-crossed love affair with an Algerian soldier, before drowning at the age of 27 in a flash flood.
Eberhardt’s life was tragic and dramatic in equal measures, and her time and identity were hopelessly fragmented in terms of geography, spirituality, drug use, and gender. Eberhardt’s diaries catapult confusingly through time and space, and Souf takes as its starting point the liminality of her wandering among four cardinal directions: Europe to the north, Algiers and Ténes to the west, Batna to the east, and the Saharan desert to the south. The piece attempts to place the listener squarely inside Eberhardt’s confusing layer of memory, emotion, fear, hope, and sense of place. Surrounding us is desert. We do not always know where we are and must commit to listening in order to gain any semblance of understanding.
When you first enter this experience, you will see a desert and hear an ambient soundtrack. As you navigate around the desert by turning your body around in 360 degrees, you will encounter ambient soundscapes in each of the cardinal directions: Europe to the North, Batna to the East, the Saharan Desert to the South, and Algiers and Ténes to the West, along with fragments of Isabelle Eberhardt’s memories, hopes, fears, musings. Like Isabelle, a nomad in the desert, you will not always know where you are, but must spend some time listening and exploring with your ears to understand the whole.