Trigger Place - A Game of Sound and Architecture

Matilde Meireles

"Play" was a project developed by Matilde Meireles and Diogo Alvim with the participation of experimental filmmaker Richard O'Sullivan. This multilayered performance was specially conceived for the annex of the Physical Education Centre at Queen's University Belfast, a building composed of several squash courts and an audience area. The project encompassed live music (a brass ensemble), electronics, video projections, and a live squash game, all affecting the perception of the site. This building became the main character of an immersive acoustic experience, where a game of squash was the starting point to explore ideas about architecture and place through sound. The squash courts were subject to acoustic processes extrapolated from two of Alvin Lucier's most important works—"Vespers" and "I am sitting in room". Also the floor markings were manipulated, as a reference to Edward Krasinski's obsession with a never-ending line. These extended beyond the performance space to reveal unexpected connections.

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The line connected us to Edward Krasiński.

Sculptor, painter and author of spatial forms, installations and happenings, Edward Krasiński was one of the most important protagonists of the Polish neo-avant-garde from the 1960s and 70s.

We set out to explore this space through two more approaches. These were based on the work of two artists, which we planned to use for methodological guidance. Nevertheless, their works became so entangled in our creative process that they were absorbed and integrated into the piece as references, evocations, appropriations, and tributes.

Introduction

The idea of the line is used in PLAY as a device to work through the process of deconstructing the rules of the game and, hence, the use of the space. The line as the marker of game areas is a manifestation of the boundary — that which separates and delimits. Soon, it starts to emphasise linearity, traversing and connecting different layers of space: the stage, the backstage, the exterior, even the past. The marker line on the court becomes a transgressive line, a catalyst for numerous spatial and conceptual relations articulating different semantic levels. This is the line as a border, the line as a thread, the line as something that pierces or blurs, the line as temporal and sonic.

Architecture Game

Krasiński

One of the most striking visual elements in these spaces was the red line that delineates the game areas. The line, present like an imaginary wall, delimits, separates, but it can also connect and guide. This line became both a conceptual tool and a compositional instrument for PLAY.

Sometime in the late 1960s, Krasiński started to attach standard blue tape to pictures and gallery walls, foregrounding what would become the key gesture of conceptual art: to move beyond the frame.

The never-ending line would cut across the gallery, moving beyond its doors into the street, over buildings, trees, and people.

‘Krasiński’s aim is as simple as it is bold — to “stick it to everywhere and onto everything in a horizontal direction” — and the tape itself serves not only to index his reach but also to augment it: “I can reach everywhere,” the artist says, “with its help.” ... “Wolves pee to mark their territory,” he says in another characteristically provocative sound bite. “I stick the blue tape to mark mine.”[…]

‘[L]ike the wolf, he puts his mark “everywhere and onto everything in a horizontal direction” and patiently and earnestly incorporates world to self through a process of gradual and systematic accretion […] [The line] says to its beholder nothing more or less than “I am the social,” nothing more or less than “I am the medium that connects people and things.”’ [8]

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