• Franziska Windisch
Encounters #06 / Chora
Encounters is an ongoing experimental series that circles around the question of how acoustic, spatial and temporal structures of a work define the interaction between the members of an audience and how these structures can be used as a material to compose spheres in which collective thinking processes and listening experiences are initiated. The sixth edition of Encounters focuses on the choir as a polyphonic body, as a form of listening, speaking and moving together. Surrounded by the remaining walls of the former halle de coulé at la Fonderie Molenbeek, the multi channel sound performance juxtaposes and associates the possibilities and dynamics of choral actions with the notion of chora (ancient Greek: space), a term that originally meant the peripheral area outside the city proper and that contributed to an understanding of space that oscillates « between the logic of exclusion and that of participation. » (Derrida, On the Name)
• Els Viaene
A point in time
Sound has the power to create a space, to inhabit a space. In this headphone performance, Els Viaene uses a binaural setup to allow the audience to become part of a common space. She constructs live a sonic space around a dummy head by moving different speakers closer and further away. It starts with one sound, a point in time, the point becomes a line, the lines become a landscape. Turning one sound into another, turning one space into another. Each step revealing another mode of listening, another way of tuning into and experiencing the sounds hidden in the landscape.
Can my ears become yours? Can the shared space become a place, somewhere we experience something together?
• Jonathan Frigeri
The Matter of Radio
It is in this space, of nothing, between the place of diffusion and the place of reception, that this story is formulated. An intangible space in which it can be accessed through hearing, a place of acousmatic listening, of absence and obliteration, a negation from which something else can emerge through the incitement of sound imagery. It is a place, but also a non-place, a space of location, but also of de-location, because it is not constrained to any topographical or architectural situation and it is able to create its own temporality. We can situate these divagations of thought in a hybrid form and close to the idea of a disoriented excursion into spectral territories.
• Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima
Dead Plants and Living Objects
Tin cans, whistles, locomotive suspension springs, porcelain bowls, compressor top bells, ping pong balls, dry agave leaves, sponges, steel wires, branches, paper foils, plastic bags, silver paper, pink gloves, piano, balloons, buckets, feathers, water, scraps, pebbles, flower pots, a guitar, metal tubes, paulownia tree seeds, pearls, bamboo sticks, logs, bones, stones, or filter queens.
Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima have been creating various ways to vibrate things in order to let their acoustic shadows dance around: invisible air volumes that constantly change shape, move in the space, enter into the most secret places, enter into us. A way to get closer to the spirits inherent in things is to listen to them. Eventually encouraging them to produce sounds and resonate by various means: to hit, caress, shake, beat, scrape, scratch, claw, boil, clap, rattle, rock, throw, move, magnetise, clamp, cook, pinch, galvanise, motorise, bow, blow, pluck, heat up, let flow, freeze, drop, drip, connect, roll, mix, ext