Resonanends in Riga (lv)

The RESONANCE network’s final showcase took place in 2014’s European capital of culture, Riga (Latvia). Organized and curated by Viestarts Gailītis and Skaņu Mežs, his ‘association for adventurous music and related arts’, all works commissioned by the network in its second two year period could be experienced as the first part of the Sound Art Exhibition SKAN II, between May 30th and June 20th of this year.

All artists were assigned their own special spot in Riga’s Botanical Garden, where they re-installed the work they had created for RESONANCE. Except for Pascal Broccolichi, who re-created his Table d’harmonie in the nearby Kalnciema iela Gallery.

Also in Riga Pascal composed the corresponding sound piece with recordings that he made locally, with a hydrophonic sensor. This time they revealed the sonic patterns caused by the streaming waters in different parts of the Daugava river and the Gulf of Riga.

Jitske Blom and Thomas Rutgers profited from the modular construction of their Beaters. They separated the installation into a number of smaller Beater panels, that then occupied an old shed (the Pump House) in the Botanical Gardens.

Peter Bogers’s Untamed Choir and Stefan Roigk’s Bursting Confidence each took up a wing of the Wolfschmidt Estate: a wooden manor-house that – or so we were told – used to be the summer house of Albert Wolfschmidt (Volfsmits in Latvian), once the royal Dutch consul in Riga, and owner of the land on which now the Botanical Gardens stand.

As the pictures suggest, the unusual spaces and surrounding in many cases managed to open up some hitherto hidden dimension of the works. This was definitely the case for the 18th century dome-shaped former wine cellar in which Aernoudt Jacobs set up his Photophon, not in the least because of the domic space’s typical acoustics.

On the first floor of the Palm House one could visit Signe Lidén’s Writings. For this fourth and final of her RESONANCE installments, Signe set up a veritable meta-installation: an installation about her previous three installations; an archive of her Writings, a diorama, photographs, things to look at…

As a work to which the notion and concept of material memory is central, Signe here turned her Writings installation into an archive of itself, which thus in Riga came full circle; like the RESONANCE project as a whole.

Last in the list, but of course not least: David Helbich made a Riga version of his performative soundwalk Tracks, starting from the Botanical Garden. As with the Kortrijk, Bergen and Maastricht versions of the walk, also the Riga version of Tracks is available at David’s web site. Anyone thus will be able to ‘perform’ the walk, at any time, until long after Riga has ceased to be European Capital of Culture, and long after now that the European sound art network RESONANCE became history…

[ Read an interview with SKAN II organizer and curator Viestarts Gailītis on Arterritory. ]