“Things… made truly Musicall with Art by my correction, and yet plaine, and capable with ease, by my direction.” Composer Thomas Ravenscroft, from Deutoromelia, 1609

At the weekends an eerie quiet descends on the City of London, in offices, squares, churchyards and streets, broken by the occasional sound of traffic and church bells. The silence of the city has inspired artist Susan Philipsz’s first commission in the capital. Her unaccompanied voice resonates through empty streets around the Bank of England, across postwar walkways and medieval alleyways and along the banks of the River Thames.

SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London takes inspiration from the heightened presence of the human voice in Elizabethan London. To be heard over one another a natural order and harmony evolved in the cries of the street traders which enthused composers of popular song such as Thomas Ravenscroft to write canons where one voice follows the other in a round. Another popular song form for several voices, the madrigal emerged in Italy in the 16th Century and soon travelled to England where it flowered as the English Madrigal School.

SURROUND ME embraces the vocal traditions of the City of London connecting themes of love and loss with those of fluidity, circulation and immersion; the flood of tears, the swelling tide and the ebb and flow of the river, to convey a poignant sense of absence and loss in the contemporary City of London.

Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands, a work installed under three bridges beside the River Clyde in Glasgow. Her work is in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, 5 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.

This project is supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.

Saturdays & Sundays only, 10am – 5pm
9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

Change Alley / London Bridge / Mark Lane / Milk Street / Moorfields Highwalk / Tokenhouse Yard

Surround Me is an Artangel commission.

Galerie Kamchatka
23, rue charles V
75008 Paris

La galerie Kamchatka est heureuse d’annoncer l’exposition HYBRID TERRITORIES qui regroupe les travaux de Joan Ayrton (artiste de la galerie) et de deux artistes invités : Grégory Chatonsky (galerie Poller, Frankfurt – New York) et Bas Zoontjens (galerie Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam) autour d’une intention d’invention du paysage.

Tous trois créent à travers les oeuvres présentées des paysages et territoires fictifs. Le paysage s’oppose à la nature en cela qu’il est un point de vue, un point précis d’où part le regard, un simple pas de côté modifie et altère notre perception d’un espace, donnant à voir tout autre chose. A l’heure où l’homme est décidé à sauver la nature et la terre, rejetant deux degrés supplémentaires au thermomètre, nous pouvons nous interroger sur la manière choisie ou non d’agencer les territoires et paysages. Aux frontières des zones rurales et urbaines, on trouve des espaces étranges et difficiles à définir. On y ronge le sauvage pour y planter ce qui ne passe plus en ville : zones commerciales et industrielles, échangeurs routiers, parkings, etc…
Ces espaces hybrides s’étendent depuis longtemps, le paysage agencé et maîtrisé dans un but fonctionnel et utilitariste. L’anthropisation – transformation d’espaces ou de milieux naturels sous l’action de l’homme – est inhérente à notre présence, l’idée de Wilderness, un espace naturel préservé à tout prix, interdit à l’activité humaine, est une utopie réalisée – tous les pays ont créés des concepts de réserves et parcs naturels – mais incomplète puisqu’elle ne peut être que temporaire. L’idée romantique d’une nature vierge et primaire ne fait pas le poids face à l’utilisation pragmatique de ses ressources et le risque constant de destruction volontaire ou accidentelle.
Deux notions s’affrontent : contrôler et régenter tel le démiurge conscient de son pouvoir et sûr de son droit ou, être le strict gardien de ce qui peut être préserver, le conservateur des vestiges naturels encore intacts, John Muir face à la vallée de Yosemite.
Le terme hybride nous renvoit également à l’altération humaine de la nature ; hybrida, en latin, définit simplement le croisement d’un cochon et d’un sanglier. C’est à travers son étymologie grecque que l’on retrouve le sens moral du mot : L’hybris étant considérée dans la mythologie comme la faute humaine ou divine de démesure, de dépassement de la limite. Dans le code moral antique, prémice de la morale chrétienne, elle est punie par la Némesis, vengeance divine destinée à rétablir l’équilibre naturel des choses.
On retrouve cette dualité dans les oeuvres de Joan Ayrton, Grégory Chatonsky et Bas Zoontjens, elles révèlent une nature et des paysages altérés, transformés d’où poignent un malaise, un sentiment étrange de désolation. Ils nous montrent des territoires hybrides, à portée de Nemesis.

Joan Ayrton, présente des oeuvres récentes de la série «Iridescant Landscape» (acrylique sur papier, 2009-2010). Dans cette série, l’utilisation de couleurs iridescantes révèle des paysages denses et complexes où la ligne d’horizon toujours présente apparaît selon l’angle de vue. «Graphite» (graphite sur bois, 2009) évoque un paysage de nuit dont la ligne d’horizon apparaît ou non selon les reflets du graphite.

«The road» (photographie, 2009), de Grégory Chatonsky dévoile des bords de route où des arbres calcinés s’entremêlent et surgissent d’une nuit d’encre. L’enchevêtrement des branches grises et mates ne nous permet pas réellement de distinguer s’il s’agit de bois ou de matériaux manufacturés détruits. Grégory Chatonsky présente également au sous sol de la galerie, une installation vidéo «The Forest» (2009), un long traveling à travers les cimes d’une forêt numérique. Il s’agit en réalité d’images en 3D créées automatiquement à partir de données récupérées sur internet.

Bas Zoontjens qui expose pour la première fois en France, présente une série de peintures sur bois de petits et moyens formats. Ses peintures fragiles inventent un monde d’architectures utopistes, évoquant un futur possible pour l’humanité. Avec très peu de moyens, il nous plonge dans un univers irréel et atemporel mêlant formes géométriques et constructions d’espaces en ruine.

http://kamchatka-artblog.blogspot.com/

The Monument Project (Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice), a new digital video installation by Chris Meigh-Andrews commissioned by Julian Harrap Architects on behalf of the City of London Corporation opens on the 21th of March at the Nunnery gallery, Bow.

The installation, which produces a continuous stream of ambient responsive panoramic images from the top of the Monument in the City of London, 24 hours a day, 7 days per week for 3 years, can be accessed at http://www.themonumentview.net/

The launch event will take place at The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Friday, March 20^th, 2009.

On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.

The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.

Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.

http://www.armelhostiou.com/

Sculptor Richard Wilson teamed up with engineer Price & Myers to slice an oval into a derelict office building facade that revolves alarmingly above the heads of passers-by in Liverpool.

full article on bdonline.co.uk

Spanning the interconnected themes of travelling, inhabiting cities, private/public space, the event featured audio/video installations by the Light Surgeons, talks by Scanner, Iain Sinclair on his last book ‘London, City of disappearances’, and film screenings from Onedotzero’s own ‘Digital Terrains’ programme. A couple of film/video pieces by Lenka Clayton & James Price particularly grabbed my attention: ‘conversation’, where two TV monitors playback interviews of passers-by making a judgement upon each other on the basis of appearance, thus giving a peculiar insight – not least funny – of people’s untold perceptions of each other; In the series of films ‘People in Order’, the film-makers intentionally set filming ‘rules’ contained in the title: In ‘Age’ they shot 100 people in their home, telling their age, shown in order. This was followed by ‘Relationship’, ‘Wealth’… offering as many original and alternative ways to go about documenting people and their environment.

The show also explored the dimension of travel, with some very interesting works by the Light Surgeons – one travelogue video showing upstairs, and the installation ‘transit’ on the ground floor, featuring a full-scale airport terminal hall with its luggage carrousel and passengers’ voices listing the contents of their luggage.
As Chris Thomas Allen (from the Light Surgeons) puts it: “The moment you arrive you have departed. As you leave you have begun a new experience. The fluid movements of our arrivals and departures map threads of intertwined experiences in transitory space. Within the pockets of personal space we carry memories, aspirations and secrets. These resonant whispers mark our personal cartographies in the public realm.”

www.articulatedlondon.org

Michael Naimark’s work involves projects of “real-space imaging”, surrogate travel and “moviemaps” based on series of photographic images of an existing landscape taken methodically on a dolly-mounted camera: an interface and a screen allowing one to “browse” backward and forward on a grid of predetermined paths and see, for instance, Aspen by car (Architecture Machine Group, MIT 1978-1980), San Francisco by air (SF Exploratorium 1987) and Karlsruhe by tram (ZKM 1990-1991). In See Banff ! (1994), he used a stereoscopic camera and the latest computer-driven video disk technologies to present the work through the peep-hole of an old kinetoscope. Interestingly, by texture-mapping bi-dimensional pictures onto a 3D immersive mode of representation, he melts photographic space and cyberspace.

¹ Margaret Morse, Nature Morte: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments, p.202-203 in Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Ann Moser. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 1996.