2018
Site specific Installation / Performance
Loudspeakers, media players

Architectonically conceived to provide access by foot to those floors and otherwise uninhabitable, the stairwell becomes a place for embodied research into the poetics of the (dis)functionality of space and of artworks as speculative forms of sensing.
Naturally lit by windows but highly reverberant, every sound that trespasses the doors of each of the 5 floors, becomes amplified and mixed into a particular form of noise. Regular usage of the stairwell punctuates the rhythm of those composite bursts of noise, signalized by doors opening and closing and all the various vocalisations, music rehearsals, steps, that sound in between. The amount of doors and the fact that all of them can be open and closed unexpectedly to release otherwise normal sounds but here mostly acoustically turned into harsh, unpleasant variations give an uncanny sense of insecurity and threat. Recordings were made then at each of the floors.

Atmospheric Bodies

Loudspeakers placed in non accessible floors facing the windows and doors of those floors, diffuse through the doors and windows the sounds of piano rehearsals, dogs barking through an open window, fragments of conversations and laughter and other expressions, punctuate the ambience. An artificial soundscape never implausible but tense and eerie. Audience roams about or loiters in the stairwell.
Someone closes the window. The dogs are silent. Only the actual sounds of the present bodies sound now. as the lights go off, a slow, oscillating low frequency drone tuned to create standing waves in the space begins. Someone in the audience its voice tremulous in the vibrating droning air announces: Black is the color that falls eternally from the Universe*
*François Laruelle “On the black universe”