The performance of part wild horses mane on both sides started exactly on two opposite sides of Room 1.28, at the Stedelijk Museum.
Part wild horses from two sides
The duo part wild horses mane on both sides explores installation and performance's experiential limits, using different sounding devices, from classical to electronic instruments and found objects.
The first part of “Kith, Schist; slowing down the time experience” began like a dialogical storytelling.
Kelly Jayne Jones played the flute on one side of the room, while on the other Pascal Nichols used an electronic set to produce a slow rhythmic droning sound, disrupted discontinuously by pre-recorded industrial noises.
The atmposphere the duo progressively created was eminently dark and gloomy, capable of evoking images of forgotten suburban landscapes, and suggesting narratives of distress and loss. While Pascal was building the environmental architecture with his sounds, Kelly Jayne seemed to play the flute to paint the stories that would develop in it.
To one side
The live execution was growing more and more compelling when suddenly Kelly Jayne stopped playing and left her side of the room. Joining Pascal, she signalled the start of the second part of the performance. This physical movement determined a slowdown in time experience, as announced in the title. However, this pace decrease determined not only a spatial flattening but also a performative and acoustic one.
Some appealing tape-recorded fragments of speech gave a seductive touch to this side of the performance. Unfortunately, these broken narratives could not redeem the inconsistent aleatory execution that accompanied them.
Concrete sounds and silences
The experimentalism shown during this section of the performance did not capture nor persuade me. A clear live investigation of materials, and of their characteristics, was carried out on the set table, accordingly to a well-known and timeless trope of sound art and concrete music. However, the challenge that had to be taken on was not about presenting, but about being present with those very materials, in the room, engaging the public, accompanying the audience in the temporal perception modification mentioned in the title.
The tactility of the sounds was completely dissipated; what remained was just a void of ambience which did not support the artists in gripping the crowd that was standing in front of them.
Stedelijk, Room 1.28
The environment in which the performance was executed helped the dispersal of the sound texture. This latter did not resonate enough to create a convincingly orchestrated presence, or absence. The pauses of silence, in fact, could be hardly perceived as consciously improvised and performed.
Silence is about time, it is about suspension. This suspension, or waiting time, was not supported by the white artificial light of the gallery. It was as if the white cube did not absorb nor modulate the tiny nuances of Part wild horses’ sounds. The space rejected them. The silence was perceived as uncomfortable.
However, this cannot be an excuse. The talent the duo showed had the potential power to fill in and magnify, even with the tiniest of the actions, the space in which it was operating. Unfortunately, they managed to prove their abilities on both sides, not just one.
