‘Bursting Confidence’ at Kunsthaus Meinblau

From June 6th until July 7th 2013, singuhr – hoergalerie presents Bursting Confidence, a sound installation created by the German artist Stefan Roigk for the RESONANCE network, at Kunsthaus Meinblau in Berlin, Germany.

Stefan made an expansive sculpture for the exhibition space – an approximately 5 meter high atrium – that works with the spatial multidimensionality of the room. In his own words: “I use mouldings of divers objects made of papier-maché as sculptural source material – formally complex and richly structured objects which create a ‘jungle-like’ spatial sculpture as they lie, stand or float, interlocking or isolated, beckoning the viewer to move through it. The plastic forms, which appear frozen, are both spatially and temporally brought to life in a multi-channelled composition. This spatial composition works both selectively and atmospherically with concrete noises, which expand the installation into an open, quasi ‘never-ending theatre work’…”

The following series of pictures, made by Heinrich Hermes, give a visual impression of the installation. Visit the installation at Kunsthaus Meinblau to hear what it sounds like and stay tuned for more on Stefan Roigk and his Bursting Confidence, in an upcoming blogpost …

Stefan Roigk – Bursting Confidence. Sound installation at Kunsthaus MEINBLAU, Pfefferberg, Haus 5, Christinenstraße 18/19, Berlin. From June 6th until July 7th, 2013. Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 2 – 8 p.m., long night: July 7th, until midnight. Free admission.

“Meanwhile, in Shanghai … (berlin)”

Following installments in Kortrijk, Riga, Maastricht and Bergen, Resonance‘s German partner Singuhr is currently hosting the fifth installment of Norwegian artist Maia Urstad‘s “Meanwhile, in Shanghai …”

In the Berlin version of her work, Maia Urstad continues her gathering of sonic details about time and place from local radio stations around the world, which are woven together in a subtle polyphony of voices, tones and white noise, transmitted via local FM-frequencies by a spiraling, labyrinthine collection of some 40 portable radio’s…

“Meanwhile, in Shanghai … (berlin)” opened on Wednesday April 25th in Kunsthaus MEINBLAU, Pfefferberg, Haus 5, Christinenstraße 18/19, Berlin. It can be experienced there each week from Wednesday till Sunday between 14h and 18h, until May 27th.

In Maastricht, in Berlin; then on to Riga …

Maastricht was hit by stormy weather, with thunder, rain and lightning, and covered by at times frightingly thick and dark clouds, when early in the morning of Friday August 26th I arrived at the Bassin, and once again entered Stefan Rummel’s Articulated Chambers installation. It felt a little magic, indeed, to find that during the 3 months out there in open space, at the far end of the quay next to the Timmerfabriek, Stefan’s installation had remained in perfect working condition.

The only proof of the time that had passed since the installation’s inauguration in May was provided by a few little spiders that had woven webs in some of the chambers’ corners…

It was the very last time that I – and anybody else – could experience Stefan’s work in Maastricht: I had come to witness the dismantling of the installation, a little later that morning. Not an easy task, as you may imagine. But once again, Intro in situ’s technical staff did a truly admirable job.

Paul and Michael disconnected the two chambers. Then a lift truck pulled the second one out of the water, and placed it on the quay, while I shot a bit of video, that I subsequently edited into the following short impression of Articulated Chambers’ dismantling.

Next week the dismantled Articulated Chambers will be transported to Riga, where Stefan is going to put them together again. There a second installment of the piece can be experienced, between Thursday September 15th and Sunday November 6th, 2011. In October no less than four more installations will join the Resonance presentation in Riga: Pierre Berthet’s Extended Drops, Esther Venrooy’s A Shadow of A Wall, Maia Urstad’s “Meanwhile, in Shanghai…” and Evelina Deicmane‘s A Long Day.

Evelina’s installation will travel to Riga from Berlin, where it is on show, until September 11th, at the Kunsthaus Meinblau. A Long Day is partially inspired by a Latvian myth about an underwater village. You can read more about the myth of the flying lake in the interview with Evelina that I did in Berlin, in June.

Here are two pictures of A Long Day, as it can be seen now in Berlin: mechanical swings with speakers sway above the heads of the visitors, who thus share the perspective of the submerged villagers as an old lady tells her version of the story of the flying lake …

[ Photos of ‘A Long Day’: © Roman März & Singuhr ]

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Evelina Deicmane’s installation A Long Day can be visited in Berlin until September 11th from Wednesday till Sunday, between 14h and 20h. Long night: September 11th, until midight. Entrance is free.
Kunsthaus Meinblau.
Auf dem Pfefferberg, Haus 5
Christinenstraße 18-19
10119 BERLIN.
More information on RESONANCE in RIGA to follow soon …

‘There’s these noises in my head, they just do not let me in peace’

From August 12th until September 11th, Kunsthaus Meinblau in Berlin shows A Long Day, an installation developed by Latvian artist Evelina Deicmane during a project residency for the Resonance project. Earlier this year, while I was in Berlin performing and recording with the Dutch-French electroacoustic alliance Diktat, I met Evelina at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in the Kottbusser Straße. There she had just finished another Berlin residency, which also had given rise to an installation, then at view at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Exhibition space: Burt Nieks (The flying lake looked down upon the village).

‘Burt’ means to bewitch, or to enchant. And ‘nieks’ stands for easy, effortless. It is a split up into two parts of Burtnieks, the name of a lake near the Latvian village where, in 1978, Evelina Deicmane was born, and which plays an important role in Latvian mythology and folklore. Like Burt Nieks, also A Long Day is inspired by the myth of the flying lake. The villagers knew that if the flying lake’s name were mentioned it would fall upon the village, submerging it and its inhabitants. A Long Day depicts the village as it now stands, indeed at the bottom of the lake. It is not necessarily a tragic tale, Evelina says, but flying lakes should not be ignored: each one of us has its own flying lake …

“In ancient times lakes flew around, looking for a place to land. Also the people of current Lake Burtnieks valley saw a lake flying as a dark cloud. It roared and howled. The day became dark as night. Petrified that it will fall down on their head, people lamented and screamed because they did not know its name. Then they went to the sorcerer and pleaded him to talk the lake away. The sorcerer just said ‘man burt nieks’ (to bewitch is easy for me), and it fell down right away. This is how the lake got its name.” Burt Nieks – Nr. 1

I found something that was quite different from what I expected, when on Monday June 20th Evelina opened up the door for Carsten Seiffarth and me, so together we could enter the room at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien where her Burt Nieks was installed. It was very ‘art’, very ‘gallery’. Quite empty (or maybe I should say: spacious) and white. One wall was covered with a great number of drawings on paper, all lined up, bare. On another wall there were a couple more drawings, framed.

There were also two wooden sculptures. Very clean sculptures, of a simple geometric shape. There was this wooden triangle, for one. It took a while before I realized that the triangle was moving; it was balancing, slowly but continuously. Inside the wooden structure one could hear the sound of the water, responsible for the back and forth movement, but so faint, that one really had to put one’s ears pretty much against it… Then there was this big rectangular wooden shape on the floor, an enormous chordophone, that looked like a blown up abstraction of an 11-string zither, a dulcimer or a cigar box guitar.

The huge instrument of course tempted me to crouch down over it, to pluck its long strings and hear what it would sound like. But when I did, the seven small motors suddenly came alive. Their ‘wings’, all simultaneously, hit the strings and made a deafening chord resound; it was as if a large boulder had suddenly materialized and, out of the blue, plunged right in the middle of the rippleless surface of, indeed: a lake on a bright summer’s day. Then it sank, and disappeared again, so that just little after one already wondered whether it was real, or merely something one imagined.

The chord was repeated every few minutes or so. There was but this one sound, that faded into oblivion no sooner than it had come into being, that could be heard while visiting Burt Nieks, an installation that needed time to discover and explore. The near to septic neatness of its presentation turned out to be a decoy; a cover-up for a fascinating turmoil of images and mystery; a text with many layers, to be read, again and again. A stubborn text, one that did not easily reveal itself, but that proved well worth the effort made to conquer it.

“In my childhood I dreamed of becoming Baron Münchhausen – a man who went to conquer the Moon sitting on a cannonball. After the teacher instructed me ‘to choose a more useful profession’ I decide to become an ice-cream seller.” Burt Nieks – Nr. 11

A little later that afternoon, in her studio Evelina made me a coffee, and we talked about her work. I started with sort of an obvious question, and maybe even a silly one. But then of course Resonance is a European network for sound art. So I simply had to ask her this:

Evelina, even though ‘sound art’ is a term and notion that is notably vague and open to a whole range of different interpretations, the Burt Nieks installation that I just visited, is not a work that on a first encounter anyone would easily classify as sound art; even though it does involve sounds. How does your work (this one, and in general) relate to sound? Would you describe yourself as a sound artist?

“No, I guess I would not describe myself as a sound artist. At least not in the way that I understand this. Because at least half of my work, a very important part, is visual. Even though there is always, of course the sound, it’s…”

What do you mean by: ‘There is always the sound?’

“Several of my works include mechanisms that were built to make sounds. They were constructed to produce sounds, but the way the mechanisms look – the visual part – is equally important. Here, as part of Burt Nieks, there are the strings, of course, and the triangle. But also in my earlier works … let me tell you about SeasonSorrow, which was at the 2009 Venice Biennale. It actually had two parts. One was a video projection in a small room, which had 12 speakers built into the floor. The video showed close ups of a group of people stuck in the snow. But much of the story was told with the sound, which included like ice cracking, and all these kind of cold sounds. The main sound was that of the person’s breathing in the cold. Because the sound of breathing in the cold is very different from the sound when one breathes in the summertime. And I recorded each person, so each of the 12 speakers was very personal. And I used this breath to make the sound of wind. The sound, like, of a very cold wind…”

“SeasonSorrow, like all my pieces, is about the people that live in my country.
Often the works are even more personal, and deal with my grand parents, or the village where I was born. It is always kind of a looking back to where I came from.
Also the piece here at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which is based on the lake Burtnieks near my village.”

So the people we see in SeasonSorrow are not actors, but people from your village?

“Yes!”

And they let you bury them in the snow?

Evelina laughs. “Yes! Mind you, we were very careful of course. No one got hurt. Everyone was happy. Actually, the trick was that I made a very large table… And then we choose the right position to shoot the images, matching up with the horizon…”

Ah, that is smart! So the things are not always what they seem…

“But there is no additional digital trickery, or whatever, afterwards; like in Photoshop or something… And then there is the other part of the piece, this mechanism with metal gears, cog wheels, like in mechanical clocks.”

“At the one end you see a motor. That is moving the smallest of the cog wheels, which transmits its movement on to the second, larger one, and so on, like a chain, up to the big one. And the big one is playing a vinyl record.”

A record! One that you made?

“Yes!”

What’s on it then? What do we hear?

“It is the sound of a snow ball rolling, from very small to very heavy. Which is, of course, what is reflected in the construction of the mechanism, the series of ‘growing’ cog wheels that set the record player into motion. This is the story: sometimes someone is making a snow ball, having big goals. The person is starting from a very small thing and then is like, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling until the ball has become so heavy that he cannot move it anymore. But then spring and summer come along. And nature will just melt the thing away. That’s very emotional. You cannot do anything about it. You can see it in the box that I use to transport the mechanism. At both sides there’s a little round window. If you look through, you will see a video. One is of a man, who is rolling the snow ball. And in the second one you see the same man in spring time. The snow ball is no longer there. It is himself now that is rolling.”

“It is what I call an ’emotional machine’. I really like to take some parts of some mechanism, and then make them play something really intimate. I built this machine because of all the wasted time and work. It doesn’t make sense that the human makes a snow ball, because always the spring will come, and the snow ball will melt away. So I built a machine. Now the work is done by a machine, and not by a human. Here is another example, that I made last year. It is called Grandfather’s Summer.”

It looks like a pair of lungs …

“I wanted to build a machine to play the instruments. There’s so many people that are going out, and try to earn a little bit of money by playing accordeon in the street. And I again found a mechanism to do that. You spin the handle, and then the accordeons are being lifted up and down, which is making the noise. And then certain buttons are pressed for the melodies … “

…

“So I say about myself that I am not really a sound artist. But there are some noises in my head that just do not let me in peace; and that is why the sound always comes back. Like the sound of coldness…”

Are these sounds that you remember?

“Sounds that I remember, or sounds that are in my head.” Again Evelina laughs. It’s an open and transparent laugh. Crystalline … Then she continues: “Or maybe the sounds are just in my head, I don’t now. It is certainly not only memory. It’s something… in general I get more inspired… Let me see … All things considered, when I look at what inspires me, it is often the sound, the noise, that then makes me see some kind of a visual… Let me show you…”
Evelina opened up a picture on the screen of her laptop.
“See, even for this work, which is actually just a photograph, I was inspired by the noise.”

Oh my, oh my! Oh dear, oh dear! I must say, now those can not have been pretty, pretty sounds! Is this the sound that you hear inside your head?

“It was a very hot summer last year, and every morning there was a man working with a saw and things. And I remember this moment when you kind of wake up, and you still do not understand if all is just inside your head, or if things are happening in reality. It is then that I became interested in this thing… like machine sounds. It just made me so much like… maybe not in peace… but that I should make some work… early morning, and…”

And this is how you feel like when you wake up in the morning?

“Yes,” she says, “when I wake up with a drilling. Especially here in Berlin everyone likes to drill things in the summer. So…”

Evelina then laughed one more time, a third time. It was a curious, modest little laugh, into which – because of our conversation, and because of the drawings that I saw, and all that she told me – I could not but read a great many different meanings. Meanings, that now make me look forward an awful lot to seeing and hearing A Long Day.

Soon …

Meanwhile, I will not lightly forget this one image, part of Burt Nieks, which, besides many other things, for me that afternoon in just a few simple lines seemed to sum up what ‘sound art’ could be all about …

“A man asked me if I wanted him to make my world smaller, this way it should be easier. I said yes. The man set out to work. He cut the world into halves and started to roll it smaller. Soon he got tired and did not finish the work. I guess sometimes men get tired of what they say.” Burt Nieks – Nr. 26

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Evelina Deicmane’s A Long Day opens on Thursday August 11th, at 19h. The installation can be visited until September 11th from Wednesday till Sunday, between 14h and 20h. Long night: September 11th, until midight. Entrance is free.
Kunsthaus Meinblau.
Auf dem Pfefferberg, Haus 5
Christinenstraße 18-19
10119 BERLIN.

Pierre Berthet – Extended Drops

From July 1st to September 12th 2010 Belgian sound artist Pierre Berthet exposed his work Extended Drops at Singuhr Hörgalerie in Berlin (Germany). The opening took place on July 1st, at 20h. Long night: September 12th.

In this work, the artist uses special self-built loudspeakers which he refers to as “extended loudspeakers”. These are loudspeaker chassis without a membrane with steel wires attached to them. The loudspeaker’s reverberations are transmitted via the wires to resonating bodies made of tin cans. The resonating bodies are linked in such a way that temporally as well as aurally differentiated sounds are projected into the space. In “Extended Drops”, the sounds of water droplets emit impulses and sounds for the network of resonators branched in the space. The analogue droplet sounds and their electronic treatment create a wide rhythmic and aural spectrum. A highly variable, spatial percussion instrument results – an homage to the former function of the space as a water reservoir.

“Extended Drops” is based on two of Pierre Berthet’s other projects: “Extended Loudspeakers” and “Drops”. The basic principle of the first one is to fix a steel wire in the motor of a loudspeaker without membrane. The wire is connected at its other end to a net of can-resonators suspended and spread in the space. The inputs sent in the loudspeaker make the steel wires vibrate and sounds come out of the cans:

“Drops” simply consists in water drops falling, from a height of about 2 meters, on various suspended tin cans, with various speeds:

More details including photographs and sound examples from “Extended Loudspeakers” and “Drops” can be found on the artist’s website, as well as on the CD “Extended Loudspeakers”, edited by SubRosa in 2009.

In “Extended Drops” these two earlier installations are combined, by applying different ways in which the drops can trigger the inputs that are sent into the extended loudspeakers:
1. A contact microphone is fixed on the side of a tin-can drum so that the sounds that result from the falling of the drops can be sent into the extended loudspeaker. The drop sounds can be pitched, so as to ensure a more efficient vibrating.

2. The two parts of a cut loudspeaker cable are installed under the falling drops, so that the electric signal passes only when they are hit by drops. (The development of this method was inspired by an installation of Arno Fabre.) The water is mixed with a small amount of chloridic acid. Inputs are modulated sine waves, pre-recorded and tuned so as to suit the installation.

Devices may be multiplied according to the dimensions of the space.

Here are a number of sound examples that were recorded during the first try-out period at the Singuhr Hörgalerie in Berlin:

Pierre Berthet has adapted his Extended Drops for the workspace of Intro In Situ in Maastricht (Capucijnengang 12). There, together with Esther Vernooy’s The Shadow of A Wall, it is part of Intro’s presentation of the Resonance project. The installations can be visited from December 11th, 2010, until January 30th, 2011. Opening hours: Wednesday till Sunday, between 12h and 17h. Entry: €3,-. Intro In Situ is closed on Christmas days and New Year’s day.
The opening of the exhibition is on Friday December 10th. It starts with a special concert of contemporary music performed on the carillon of the Maastricht town hall, at 20h. ]