“Corps Sonores” is a sound installation paying tribute to Philippe Franck—art historian, teacher and lecturer, sound artist, founder and director of Transcultures, and the driving force behind major sound and digital culture projects in the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (City Sonic, Transnumériques, Transonic, etc.)—who passed away suddenly in late January 2025.
Initiated by Isa*Belle and developed in collaboration with artists Gauthier Keyaerts, Stéphane Kozik and Christian Leroy, the piece chooses to evoke Philippe through what remained closest to him: traces of everyday use, life choices, a particular way of inhabiting the world. The starting point is a collection of T-shirts he was especially fond of. These “fabric-objects,” steeped in memory and emotion, become the material of the work—not as static relics, but as active elements, transformed into resonant instruments.
From this intimate wardrobe, the artists build a sonic dramaturgy: an original composition reconstructed from Philippe’s audio archives—fragments of works, textures, field recordings—then reassembled and reinterpreted with an almost tactile attention. What matters here is not quotation, but momentum: to reconnect with the energy, creativity and vision that shaped his path, and with that sense of movement—a way of letting sound circulate as a space of attention, a vehicle for experience, an occasion for encounter.
Then the T-shirts seem to come alive, as if by enchantment. They swell, ripple, contract, and breathe—ghosts finding a temporary body, a visual and acoustic choreography poised between the tangible and the vanishing. They leave behind a double trace in the air—material and immaterial—like the persistence of a presence that cannot be reduced to memory. An extended breath: a true respiraSon.
Isa*Belle (Fr/Be)
Isa*Belle develops her artistic approach for and through the well-being of the body – in its multiple dimensions – associated with personal and spiritual development.
Evolving between Belgium and France, she has been working since 2005 in collaboration with Paradise Now to produce several performances and sound installations supported by Transcultures / City Sonic and broadcast internationally.
She has also collaborated with several musicians (Maurice Charles JJ, Matthieu Safatly, Stephan Dunkelman …) and visual artists (Simone Simon, Joseph Dadoune, Régis Cotentin), created the duet Unda with Ariane Chesaux and joined, in 2015 Werner Moron and Philippe Franck in the audio-poetic combo “Les ours bipolaires”.
Gauthier Keyaerts (Be)
Gauthier Keyaerts questions ‘matter’ through sound and through still or moving images, in an interactive and complementary style. Sonic artist (several albums published on Sub Rosa and Transonic as well as installations and performances broadcast internationally) and interdisciplinary, he bases his work on two essential elements:
a radically materialist approach, a real call to rediscover our senses whether through sound or image
a willingness to communicate with the public, to generate a free and open space of reflection.
His favorite subjects are life, nothingness, the beauty of insignificance, the elements, time, and memory.
Stephane Kozik (Be)
Stéphane Kozik has been working for around twenty years as a sound artist, visual artist and musician. His practice mainly takes the form of audiovisual performances, sound installations and short films. It is a multidisciplinary approach—sensory, attentive to nuance, poetic, and sometimes infused with humour. In his pieces, he engages with reality through the lens of sound, developing an audiovisual language through which he builds narratives and fictions that place music and sound at the forefront.
He draws inspiration from the role sound plays in cinema—too often pushed into the background despite being essential in shaping emotion, atmosphere and the viewer’s psychological experience. Starting from this observation, he reverses the usual hierarchy and attempts to invent a “cinema for the ears”: a cinema of the senses in which images and storytelling serve sound rather than the other way around. These are stagings designed to foreground listening—another way, in a sense, of “bringing things into sound”.
To achieve this, he is constantly devising new sonic and musical setups that push him toward unfamiliar ways of composing and making music. Each new development opens up unexpected territory, generating distinct, sometimes unforeseen sound and visual imaginaries. Whether in performance, installation or video form, Stéphane Kozik experiments with—and plays on—the close ties between material and sound, in an effort to forge his own audiovisual language and offer a renewed reading of the real.
Christian Leroy (Be)
Composer, pianist and live film-concert performer, Christian Leroy began accompanying silent films at a very early age and has been doing so for over forty years. In this way, he has explored the silent cinema repertoire by improvising to nearly two hundred films. His ability to blend elements of classical music with electronic music is one of his truly distinctive hallmarks. He regularly performs film-concerts in Belgium and internationally, on the stages of numerous festivals and institutions across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, as well as North and South America.
In addition to his compositions for silent cinema, Christian Leroy has written around fifty film scores — for animation, documentaries and auteur films — selected and awarded at major festivals in Rome, New York, Istanbul, Hyderabad, Taiwan, Porto, Cannes, Clermont-Ferrand, Berlin, Toronto, Annecy, Bogotá, Montecatini, Brussels, Namur, and many others.
Among other works, he composed the music for *Nanook of the North* by Robert Flaherty, *Dracula* by Tod Browning, *The Last Laugh* by Murnau, *Gosses de Tokyo* by Ozu, *Cenere* by Febo Mari, *El Sexto Sentido* by Manuel Sobrevilla, *Tabu* by Murnau and Flaherty, *Sunrise* by Murnau, *The Fall of the House of Usher* by Jean Epstein, *The Passion of Joan of Arc* by Dreyer, as well as the complete filmographies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
His works have been released on Polydor, Igloo, EMI, Gega New and Cristal Records. He has performed alongside both classical and jazz musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Pierre-Alain Volondat, Steve Lacy, Barre Phillips, Fred Van Hove, Marilyn Crispell, Boyan Vodenitcharov, Rona Hartner, Irène Jacob, among others.
Philippe Franck (Fr/Be)
Under the name Paradise Now, Philippe Franck developed, from the early 1990s onward, a multifaceted artistic trajectory shaped by a forward-looking approach and a strong collaborative ethos. He composed and produced music for choreographic works, exhibitions, interdisciplinary performances and videos (notably for Régis Cotentin, Hanzel & Gretzel and Thomas Israël), as well as multimedia pieces in collaboration with digital artists Philippe Boisnard, Marc Veyrat and art2.network.
In 2014, Philippe Franck co-directed the film Bernard Heidsieck, la poésie en action, which was also released as a book-and-DVD box set titled Variations sur Bernard Heidsieck.
Alongside his collaborations with holistic performer Isa*Belle (several body/sound installations and performances since 2005), Paradise Now also worked with electronic musicians Christophe Bailleau (as part of the duo Pastoral), Gauthier Keyaerts (within Supernova), Stephan Dunkelman, Christian Leroy, Didié Nietzsche, and vocalist/performer Maja Jantar, as well as with several poets including Ira Cohen, Gerard Malanga, Werner Moron, Eric Therer, Catrine Godin and Habiba Sheikh. From 2021, he was part of the hypermedia collective Société i Matériel, where he was responsible for the sound and poetic dimension.
His recordings were released on labels including Transonic, Optical Sound and Sub Rosa. Philippe Franck passed away on January 27, 2025.
Informations
- 31.01.2026 > 01.02.2026
12:00 > 20:00 & 12:00 > 16:00 - Flagey (Studio 2)
Place Sainte-Croix, 1050 Bruxelles - Gratuit sans réservation
- lasemaineduson.be
Production
- La Semaine du Son
- with the support of Transcultures
