Ground Sound, Performance

https://vimeo.com/1008061923

It is during my residency on the island of Refshaleøen in Copenhagen, that I witnessed the construction of a new island, which raised a number of questions: how does one build an island? What materials are used? What am I actually walking on? For me, coming from the country, watching the construction of an artificial island was a very new experience...
 A wasteland caught my attention. Apart from the fact that the land faced the sea, it reminded me of the strangeness of the industrial landscapes in which I grew up. Surrounded by old warehouses, it was full of secrets and I spent many days observing this strange environment; I then became the guardian of this landscape. During my daily surveys, I discovered traces of the old shipyard entangled with sprawling weeds: rusty metal plates, the remains of a hypothetical pylon, then a long straight railtrack splitting and crossing the earth... Fascinated by the details of this area's vegetal and mineral micro-topography, I began to make a photographic inventory of the gravel, pebbles, asphalt and cracked concrete cohabiting with grasses, mosses, flowers and shrubs.
A question began to emerge: ‘Would it be possible to make the surface of this soil resonate to reveal its textures, and what would we hear then? I embarked on a rather crazy idea: to translate my images into sound using image-processing software to transform visual textures into sound textures - as if the landscape became the equivalent of a score. My intention was to create a kind of living memorial for this wasteland with its forgotten history by revealing the traces of the vanished infrastructure through sound. Focusing on the straight line of the rail - I created a sound and tree composition using branches found on the site and six speakers to recreate six different ground textures. I hid the speakers inside the rail so that the audience would focus on the ground and not on the broadcasting equipment. The speakers were placed just below the surface, at the exact location of the photograph, broadcasting a kind of sound image of the site. One of my surveying methods was to walk around dragging metal tubes over the ground to make its various textures resonate. I found some of these tubes lying around on the island and enthusiastically built a new amplified instrument: a sort of tubophone... I then criss-crossed the landscape with this artefact - acting like a sapphire on a vinyl turntable - to extract all its sonorities. The result was an instantaneous analogue composition through walking, a reading of the ground through movement, a memorisation of the landscape through the body... As I moved around, the telluric harmonics and other granulosities resonated throughout the wasteland, surrounded by the sea and ghost buildings!
 During my stay, I met 84-year-old Mogens, a locksmith and metalworker. One of the oldest workers of the island: he is a true living monument! I asked him, the bearer of the memory of this site to also walk through the landscape with one of his own metal tubes. By moving slowly through the landscape, he amplified the different textures of the soil and made the earth sing, the earth he had always loved working on... Later, I asked 14-year-old Sonja to accompany him. The daughter of Maru, one of the artists in residence with me, Sonja came from Romania. Unlike Mogens, she had just discovered this landscape, which she was visiting for the first time... thanks to Metropolis residency, Mogens and Sonja !