We Head Out, 2021
Installation with recycled wood, sound
Gravity Track 1
Interactive Multichannel Audio System, Microphones, Exciters, Bass Shakers, recycled wood
Gravity Track 2, sounddesign in collaboration w/Otis Thomet
Stereo Audio System with Raspberry Pi & Random Generator, Ultrasonic Sensor, Speakers, recycled wood
City of Zurich Grants 2021, Helmhaus Zurich CH.
special thanks to: Caroline Ann Baur, Melody Chua, Janis Labhart, Angi Nend, Genelec
photo & video credits: Flavio Karrer
link to audio
The artist explores possibilities of active listening and how it can be used as a feminist, decolonial and mindful tool. The everyday sounds Vanessà Heer works with are in constant negotiation between the moving body and its social, architectural, and geographical environment. For the installation We Head Out, she collects footsteps passing by her and listens to how they manifest themselves in place or inscribe themselves in memory as echoes. In their multiplicity, they form a circuit of physical presence. In doing so, she uses the sounds of footsteps and their echo as a tool of participation and involvement in a continuous rhythmic flow. Heer highlights the polyrhythmic potential of the steps and makes the invisible aspects of walking audible. We Head Out interrogates the potentialities of active listening in chorus, delving into the transpositions of sound, the meditative of rhythms, and the archival inscriptions of vibrating memory.