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2026 winner of the “Creative Residencies” as part of the Phonurgia Awards.
Creative residency.
On March 11, 2011, a fault line five hundred kilometers long formed off the coast of Japan, and the resulting wave spread at an average speed of two kilometers per second. This means that it took 250 seconds to travel from north to south.
With the Call It Anything collective, we spent two months traveling along the Michinoku Coastal Trail, which runs along the coast devastated by the 2011 tsunami. We met locals who told us what life was like before 2011, how far the wave reached into their homes, and how they are rebuilding their daily lives after the disaster. After a few days, I noticed a dense network of loudspeakers along the dykes, which played a different synthetic melody every day at 6 p.m., ranging from heroic fantasy to Catholic hymns to Let It Be by The Beatles. I decided to stop at that exact time every day to take stock of these sirens and the places where I happened to be at that moment.
Back in France, I meet Alexandre Schubnel, a geophysicist. He recreates the pressure conditions that cause earthquakes in his laboratory. For him, what happens in a fault can be summed up by the idea of friction: the rock melts, like rosin on a bow, and creates a wave that spreads across the Earth's surface, like a note on the soundboard of a violin.
Mentions
Production
Cie L’Effraie; France Culture
Co-production
ANR REX research project; Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology — LESC (Paris Nanterre); F93, Center for Scientific, Technical, and Industrial Culture (Montreuil); Cie L’effraie
Broadcast
France Culture – L’Expérience (scheduled to air in fall 2026, date to be confirmed)
Biography(s)
Bastien Lambert
Documentary filmmaker, musician
Bastien Lambert produces programs for France Culture, RTS, and RTBF, including Retour à La Hague on the perception of nuclear risk in the Cotentin region, Carte postale de Centuri, selected for the Grandes Ondes section of the 2025 Brest Festival, and Grandir, ou pas... a family and medical investigation into short stature. After earning a bachelor's degree in socio-anthropology in Caen and studying jazz and improvised music at the Caen Conservatory and then at the Paris Conservatory, he studied electroacoustics in Éric Broitmann's class (Angoulême). He is the reference person for the digitization of the Yann Paranthoën private collection, in partnership with Logelloù (Penvénan) and the Côtes d'Armor Departmental Archives, and has been teaching at Créadoc (Master's in Documentary Production in Angoulême) since January 2026.
Walking Along the Edge of the Fault Line
Bastien Lambert
Residence
Fri, March 27 — Fri, April 10, 2026
Distribution
Bastien Lambert
writing, composition, sound recording
Gilles Mardirossian
, produced by France Culture
Aurélie Charon
Inès Dupeyron
Production L’Expérience — France Culture
Call It Anything collective
composed of
Sophie Houdart
Lucie Taïeb
Florence Voisin
Élodie Descoubes
Marc Boissonnade
Alexandre Schubnel
Stéphane Sautour
Mélanie Pavy
voice
Useful links