Now There was Here, 2021
Installation with recycled wood, Interactive Multichannel Audio System, Microphones, Bass Shakers
Dimension variable
Max Frisch Bad / JETZT KUNST N°10. Freibad Letzigraben Zürich, 2021
photo credits: Philip Frowein
Everyday walking is often a liminal, semi-conscious and semi-automatic activity. Walking generates rhythms that, through physical presence, enter into constant negotiation between the moving body and its context - the social, architectural and geographical environment. With the walk-in audio installation, the artist picks up where she left off, inviting visitors and walkers to get involved and listen to their steps.
The shifting and overlapping of walking rhythms creates a hybrid, asymmetrical space. The staircase suddenly becomes a stage that echoes the footsteps from an origin that cannot be immediately located. Present and absent bodies manifest themselves by becoming perceptible as acoustic phenomena moving in time. In memory of the people who were hanged in this place, an echo resounds - from ourselves and from others. Outside and alongside subjectivity, sociality and identity, the rhythmic expression of the steps stands for the transparent in the visible, the hidden in the obvious and the inaudible in the audible. The installation focuses on listening to the physical presence from a point of listening that is not only subjective, revealing the embedded and hidden otherness in the self and articulating it as a series of rhythmic, sonic and spatial situations. These situations embody the otherness we all share and enable relationships that are not defined by the classification, meaning and representation of the other, but as relationships of "being with" and "passing by" the other and recognizing oneself as the other.