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Installations

Noventa e Três (para Colönia)

(2012)

view of the installation

Transducers, glass panes, DVD.

May to September 2012, Colönia Micro-Gallery, Porto. Commissioned by Joana Machado and João Cruz.

view of the installation

Colönia is a store and design studio in Porto that ran a “micro-gallery” in their shop window. Developing a work for that context presented us with several interesting constraints. The first was that it had to be shown in a storefront, visible from the street outside, without sound, and from the inside, with sound. The second was that the work needed to coexist with the shifting context of the store and studio where customers would be received and work developed. Therefore, the sound needed to be “unobtrusive” and allow daily occurrences at the store and studio to go on unencumbered, while nevertheless having a distinct presence of its own. It also seemed clear that we should avoid excessive repetition, so we aimed at a long-form composition by creating several modules with varying durations (ranging from a few seconds to about half an hour) that played back randomly.

This was the first time we used prefabricated materials and constructed the entire work from its infrastructure: two transducers sitting on glass panes that acted as their resonant surfaces. All sound was produced through these four elements, which were also the visual centres of the composition. The piece created a thin layer of sound that permeated the entire space, a discreet presence that sometimes was not immediately noticeable but that, for five months, became part of the store.

view of the installation

view of the installation

view of the installation

Thank you to António Coelho and Rui Rodrigues at FEUP.