Whisperings
environments for whispering horns and voices
2020–21with Sono-Choreographic Collective
Whisperings are environments that bring together the whisper, a speech act at the limits of audibility, with the urgency of unheard or under-represented perspectives, ideas and stories. Each version performs these critical whispers through its own texts and instruments.
Whisperings: Circle is an intimate congregation of seven custom-made horns that whisper seven texts, one for each day of the week. The whisperings ponder the etymological and astrological roots of the days. It was made for 9days8nights, an exhibition by the Sono-Choreographic Collective at sign,CIAT in Berlin that invited visitors to inhabit instruments for a poetic measurement of plural durations of being, together with Room Tunings.
Whisperings: Whistleblowers grounds the atmospheric sensitivity of electro-acoustic wind instruments in political voices. It draws on three instances of whistleblowing, one mythical and two contemporary: the tale of King Midas, whose barber whispered his secret into a hole in the ground until the reeds sang it across the land, and the manifestos of John Doe (the Panama Papers) and Edward Snowden. Their words, voiced by artificially generated speech, are transduced onto seven electro-acoustic string-drum-horns tuned to a Phrygian aulos mode, where they blend with the whispers of the wind.
From the script: Wednesday
This is the day of Wednes. Wed-ness is the quality of being wed. Wedded. Wedding. A ceremonious union. Of what? Of the old world and a-new? Of antiquity and modernity?
A ceremonious overtake of the other by the One. For this wedding marks the complete erasure of the old world. This day only refers to the accumulation of days into a week, and the folding of that week in the middle. Nothing larger, no planets, no gods. Oh no. No gods. In the middle of the week, there is no more a god.
The Germanic Mittwoch marks the successful erasure of deities and planets, a cosmic crashing down to a flat, weak, weekly reality. But this erasure is temporary, for the gods will reappear tomorrow.
The mid-week is the ominous mid-wife for tomorrow's uncanny birth: the birth of dead deities. Still born gods are the birth of loss. But the loss of what?
This is not merely the loss of digital folklore. It is the loss of a technology. The ecological technology of god-making. You see, we see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we sound, we touch, we shine, we heat, we cool, we wet, we flash, we rumble, we tremble, we erupt, we rise, we sink, we think we make sense, but we also simply sense. And we sense our environment, and the technology of god-making is simply a technology of deification, of turning sensory data into deities, deities that interface our being and our being-in-the-world. This interface translates the verb of sens-ing thunder into the noun of Thor, Thor of thunder, a god of thunder, our god of our sense of our thunderous world.
To start re-turning to our senses, must we re-turn to the technology of god-making? To re-think and re-sense our planets today, will we have to re-birth our suns and our lunar daughters all over again?
Iterations
- 2020 · Whisperings: Whistleblowers · Dystopie Sound Art Festival, Berlin · conceived as an outdoor installation; a single-instrument version was shown in the foyer of the Alte Münze after Deutsche Bahn withdrew the outdoor permit
- 2021 · Whisperings: Circle · sign,CIAT, Berlin · 30 August – 7 September, in 9days8nights
- 2022 · Whisperings: Circle · Open Studio Night, Gerichtshöfe, Berlin · 10 September, durational performance-installation from sunset to nightfall
- Commissioned by
- Contemporary Institute for Art and Thought (CIA&T), Berlin; Dystopie Sound Art Festival, Berlin
- Sono-Choreographic Collective
- Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Kiran Kumar
- Support
- VG Bild-Kunst
- Photos
- Sono-Choreographic Collective
