For the 17th edition of Côté Court, a short film festival in Seine-Saint-Denis, the Laboratoires submitted a sound installation by composer Pierre-Yves Macé, entitled Speech Acting. The idea of the installation is to allow speech to be heard as an act of pure elocution, robbed of all linguistic articulation and semantic content.

In the exhibition space at the Pavillion at Pantin, eight tiny speakers were placed in a circle and directed toward its center. The loudspeakers played eight foreign-language versions of the entire soundtrack of the Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory dubbed into English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Thai, and Japanese. Given that each foreign-language track had been perfectly lip-synced with the actors' mouths, their simultaneity allows us to hear eight perfectly overlapping languages.

Freed of trying to make out an intelligible discourse, the listening experience procured from this setup seizes the spoken word and language in its original and pure dimension as "taking place."