Louis-Olivier Desmarais
Abbaye
Contemplative audio documentary, 2019
Independent production, with the support of RTBF
On the banks of Lake Memphremagog, in Quebec, stands the Abbey of St-Benoît-du-Lac. Twenty-six monks live there, according to the precepts of the Rule of St. Benedict. Abbaye is a proposal to meet them, through sound. A contrasting universe where sonic and poetic encounters are staged between the microscopic and the immense, the prosaic and the spiritual, the anecdotal and the imaginary, the ancient world and the modern world.
The first part of the project won the Pierre Schaeffer Découvertes prize awarded at the 2017 Phonurgia Nova Awards as well as 3rd prize in the 2017 Real Real Listening competition organized as part of the Montreal International Documentary Meeting. The project was also a finalist for the documentary prize at the 2019 Wavelength Festival in Brest and supported by the Gulliver grant (SACD France and Belgium) and was broadcast on Radio Télévision Belge Francophone in 2019.
In January 2021, the documentary was made available on the streaming platform Tënk.
Photo : Georges A. Driscoll, BANQ
Louis-Olivier Desmarais : Original idea, production, artistic direction, recording, composition and post-production.
Podcast interview, Imaginaires du présent, 2021
« An exceptional piece by Louis-Olivier Desmarais. Abbaye, a visit that makes a place ring. A piece that is both contemplative and concrete in reality, both musical and sound. »
-Pascale Tison, Par ouï-dire, RTBF (Brussels)
Radio interview, Des hommes et des sons
Radio Campus Paris, 2018