Saturday 25 February 14:25
Vertical Studies: Acoustic shadows and boundary reflections. by Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer Eide. Photo by Pieter Kers
By
Annabel McSpadden
Standing in the emptied Sint Jansklooster water tower, you cannot help but feel a nervous energy. A narrow temporal buffer – time, not space – separates you from when this tower contained thousands of liters of crushing force.
Here, artists Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer Eide have accessorized the 46-meter high cement room with speakers, unrecognizable instruments, and glass resonators raised on extending poles so high they stand a little crooked. Their exhibit,
Vertical Studies: Acoustic shadows and boundary reflections draws from geographical sounds they accumulate and perform in situ.
Lidén and Eide have taken the pulse of the reachable earth. Now they stand in the brutalist interior of a decommissioned tower and offer this tender thrum in vertical and auditory dimensions. Audience members disperse among the stairwell and stand silently while their planet’s music reverberates around them.
Birdsong filigree plays with the upper register while a hollow wind drones steadily underneath. Rumbles blend into one another; the oceanic masquerades as the atmospheric. A tenuous buzz suggests the insect or the atom. You hear an orchestral earth, and an earth ravaged by maddening chaos. Its vibrations shift between major and minor keys without warning, pulling you across the emotional spectrum; you are lonely, you rejoice.
The beauty and cruelty of
Vertical Studies lies in this juxtaposition of vulnerability and force. You stand in water’s domain, its legacy present in stained cement around you. You feel, as you vibrate to the sounds of the atmosphere and earth, the metaphorical and physical resonance of water. Water erodes, erases. Water cascades over human labors and reduces them to shreds of themselves. It topples the sandcastle, it sinks the vessel. Water renders us – and everything we build, mark, love – impermanent.
We listen to sounds born, sounds fading into death, and we feel an auditory existentialism. Water reminds us of our own transience, our inescapable earthliness. What noises are worth hearing if none remain? What noises are we qualified to make, when the earth itself echoes around us, and then surrenders to the silent force of water remembered? Water humbles us, and we are dwarfed by the architecture, awash in constructed yet organic musical ecology. Here, Lidén and Eide seem to say, listen to the world. If it is fragile, what are you?
Vertical Studies: Acoustic shadows and boundary reflections. by Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer Eide. Photo by Pieter Kers
