Andrea Parkins: "Sonic Spaces for the Stray”: (Dif)Fusing Dis-location in Sound Installation and Performance
I recognize that there is a sense of incompleteness or the fragmentary about the artistic works that are the result of my research. Are they fragments or are they (even) artworks? Artistic researcher Mareike Dobewall raised this question when she interviewed me as part of her research project The Body of Sound. We had been discussing the recent interest in the work of the late sound artist Maryanne Amacher whose works are not fully realizable or accessible to listeners in the way that she had intended them, but are now represented by researchers such as Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini, who have gathered and published elements of her archive—drawings, writings, scores and recordings—along with their written analysis that contextualizes Amacher's work.11 In thinking of Amacher, and how her work may never be fully available to audiences, but in some way can be sensed through the exploration of the fragments of her practice, my response to Dobewall was this: "A totality is made with the gathering of fragments as a reconstitution and reassemblage of practice, so that a listener might understand that totality, even without the presence of the maker, as a 'completed' work."
