laetitia boulud | alex de jong
snow at the listening post
Art month has come and gone. Our listening post has withstood an autumn gale, was blown down, resurrected again and bravely weathered what the winter would throw at it. Now, work in the studio continues, and the focus has shifted back to the camera. Circling in, sharpening our razor.
Eventually, the Force 10 gale Force 9 gale that hit Ameland lifted the listening post from its pole holes and put it down gently, and in one piece, in the field. Yesterday afternoon, five angels put it back where it belongs.
We’re in the process of preparing a new installation that is based on atavistic sensory perception. We use subsonic sound and manipulate the peripheral visual field to create an experience of fear and the supernatural. Warning if you listen to the video: be careful if you use headphones, and don’t attempt playback over common subwoofers
We’re showing work at “be my guest” a group exhibition that can be found at The Diaghilev, 56 Mazeh Street, Tel Aviv. Hotels and hotel rooms are very dear to our heart, and it’s a first for us to be showing work inside a hotel room. On show are photographs, and a collection of 1.30 minute short videos. The exhibition was curated by Keren Bar Gil.
rethinking visual’s installation “be quiet eyes” will be showing during Art Month Ameland, on the Dutch island of Ameland at “Dit Eiland“, the gallery of cross-media artist Timo Mank (Archipel Media Lab). “be quiet eyes” exists in the real world in the field behind the gallery, where it is the complement to the remains of a round silo. Here, rethinking visual have built a listening post, a shelter, containing an extract of the sounds of the field that were recorded during a month long period. This sound mapping had its basis in Second Life, where it was designed, and its virtual model in Second Life is shown in Museum Sorgdrager Huis as the second installation to this piece.
In its construction, the listening post refers to the surrounding landscape and the old dike on which it stands, being built from willow saplings that are harvested from the land itself.The felt is likewise a natural material used in the building of mongolian yurts.The effect is one of insulation and protection, a shelter where sight is switched off and sound becomes the dominant sensory stimulus.
When people ask about the work, one thing I downplay, but sometimes say, is that it is also political. It’s about getting access to visual arts for me as a blind artist, and making it accessible too. It’s not just a postcard from the country of the blind, it’s also an entrance ticket to visual arts, or so I hope. A festival such as Mapping is tough going, although even with my level of sight I could enjoy all installations at MAMCO, with the exception of that by Mathias Oostrik. However, most performances, workshops, sessions were inaccessible, not because of the sight thing, but because of an inability to get the information I need in large crowds (i.e. a room with more than 5 people in it). In those situations I really need a guide/bodyguard/pointer-out, but that such a person is not always available. And so, being at a festival, usually an excellent way to get to knowledge, simply by connecting with people over drinks, was of very limited use. And I think that this is the main factor holding back participation by blind people in visual arts: for now, “blind art” exists as if in a Reservation, with specialized organisations promoting it, arranging showings of blind artists’ work. Only a handful, it seems, operate as other artists do. At Mapping it certainly felt like an uphill battle. It occurred to me how isolated I was, how apart from the general flow of things. With that came the opening up of a huge field of practice. Immersiveness, spatial interventions: that road seems open to me
Mapping 2010 is over and done with, the space has been given back to the MAMCO building and the voices have been laid to rest. A week of rest and then to gather thoughts for what this installation, the “mother ship” will give birth to. Although we didn’t have much opportunity to experience the entire festival, it felt wonderful to be in such a supportive environment. From this dark many things will spring. The place we chose to occupy, at the intersection of seeing/not seeing, our low-tech ways of producing experiences, our desire to produce a big spatial intervention, all that will funnel into other projects, circling back, as always, to that one moment of release when we press the shutter.
It’s easy to forget, while assembling an installation that looked simple on paper but turned to be much less so in reality, that much of it, the “dark” part and its narrative, sprang from one essay I read in 2008 and then blogged about, Tasha Chemel‘s exploration of the narrative underlying heroism and victimhood of the blind. In fact, the installation’s title, “Longing for Sight”, was paraphrased from another essay she wrote. So if there is anyone who has been present at the birth of this installation it has been Tasha. As she writes:
But to imply that I “see with my heart,” that is, that I judge people not by their looks, but “by the content of their character,” an assertion that those who know me well would be quick to refute, is to imply that I am inherently different from sighted human beings, that we lack a common means of understanding the world. What few stop to realize is that to be called pure, nonjudgmental, even “amazing,” or “inspirational,” to be labeled as “different” in such a profound way is to be deprived of our universal human qualities.
