Imaginary Spaces, Cable Factory 2020, full video (Bambù Locquet Vanderberghe)
Catalysti Association of Transcultural Artists https://youtube.com/@catalysti
In Imaginary Spaces (Black Box, Helsinki Music Centre, Helsinki 18.10.2016 / Cable Factory, Valssaamo 10.10.2020) I had the interest to create a manifold performing space, where music would happen and be experienced in different locations (acoustic, virtual, imaginary) and in different ways, in an environment shaped by sounds, objects, and projections. It was a plural work in many senses, the first one I realised in a collaborative way – with the cellist/composer Juho Laitinen, the expanded cinema artist Marek Pluciennik, the media artist Roberto Fusco (Pugliese), and the scenographer Sampo Pyhälä. We had a three-day workshop in Kallio Kuninkala (the Sibelius Academy residency near Järvenpää) in preparation of the performance.
The piece was in three parts (Curves, Interaction, Other) seamlessly unfolding over about thirty minutes. The audience was invited to seat or lie on the floor around the boxes and the hall, while the cellist played in two different positions along a diagonal. It was an immersive, multichannel work, with an array of ten loudspeakers (six on the ground and four on the ceiling.)
Together with Marek, looking for unconventional surfaces to project on, we came up with the idea of a curved surface – an idea coherent with the spirit of the texts, notably Niemayer’s phrase about nature shapes and bodies’ shapes. Sampo proposed an inflatable half-sphere, which, placed on one end of the hall, gave an uncanny character to the space.
The accent was on the participatory actions: the audience was invited to play with music boxes, a small camera hidden in a spheric object, and to trigger soundfiles using their own voices, through microphones hanging from the ceiling. The presence of the boxes (a sort of sound-installation with two movable elements), was important: made in various shapes and materials with different resonance properties (a wooden dodecahedron, a carton box with inclined plans, a plaster parallelepiped, a styrofoam sphere), the objects were designed together with Roberto and Sampo. This work was somehow a development of my interest in materials and resonances, that I had approached through the software Modalys in 2000-2006 (see the quadraphonic work Rooms of Elements, 2006).
Through the IRCAM software Catart, small parts of the vocal and instrumental sounds (grains of different lengths) were spectrally coupled with cello sounds and played live in a chamber music connection with Juho. The spoken voice files contained the voices of the four performers, included mine, with the addition of a French voice (the conductor Chloé Dufresne). The languages used were English, Italian, and French.
The collected texts included fragments by Witold Gombrowicz, Oscar Niemayer, Gaston Bachelard, Paul Valéry, Simone Weil, and the Chândogya Upanishad. All of them are texts about space, seen from different angles – physical, conceptual, imaginary, poetical, mystical.
The texts were projected around the audience during the performance. An idea was that the audience would use them as material to trigger the sounds.
Instead of the inflatable sphere (too big for the new space), Sampo built an inflatable suspended semi-transparent structure, hanging from the ceiling in one end of the hall.
Overall this alternative space allowed a more relaxed and warmer atmosphere where to play and interact, compared with the institutional space (despite the use of face masks and gloves for the Covid pandemic). The space was also populated with other artworks, which invited us into a virtual dialogue with other art forms.
Keywords: multiplicities, voices/languages/texts, space, curved line, performance, installation
Imaginary Spaces 2016
Paola Livorsi, composition and sound design
Juho Latinen, cello and sound design
Roberto Fusco (Pugliese) live electronics and sound design
Marek Pluciennik, live processed video
Sampo Pyhälä, stage design
Jukka Kolimaa, light design
Olli Keskinen, Marko Myöhänen, sound engineers