Audiovisual installation, 2021
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. This project was also supported by the Conseil Regionale Hauts-de-France. I would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the Mamu peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which my childhood home was built and where the recording for this project takes place.
Braced Under the Heating Sun is centred around listening to and documenting my childhood home and its aural particularities that arise from its architecture and location in Far North Queensland. The project is based on my recordings and experiences there in february – march 2020, between the waning Black Summer bushfires and the cusp of the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s a place where the outside is always coming in, where nature (the wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (the organized interior). It came together as an audiovisual installation in five chapters focuses on what was happening there at that point in time, including: the cracking of the house adjusting to the sun heating the roof, the subtly changing cicada songs from dusk to dawn, the path being taken to mow the lawn, the texture of voices (animal and human), and rain. I focused on these particular moments because they offered me a way to reflect on ideas of porosity, natural polyrhythms, rhythms and cycles of the everyday, non-hierarchical listening and recording strategies, ecology, and everyday moments that happen in contingency with the world rather than being isolated from it.
The house is made from wood and so bends with the weather. The wooden structure amplifies the sounds of our habitation. The house is located on the edge of a small town and next to a sugar cane farm. Although in a tropical climate it has no fly screens. The windows are open all of the time to let a breeze through. Most evenings you can find green tree frogs, geckos and insects amongst other animals in or around the house. In this way nature (a wild exterior) pushes against and blurs into the home (an organised interior).
It is never silent there, the sounds are a mix of all forces; human/animal, natural/industrial. For me, it resonates as a site that is connected to the world despite its rural location. In this house the “rhythms and cycles of the living and the immediate needs of every living being are highlighted and played out. It is where intensities proliferate themselves, where forces are expressed for their own sake, where sensation lives and experiments, where the future is affectively and perceptually anticipated” (Elizabeth Grosz 2008).
I invite you to discover the complete project dossier and samples of the aural components here.
This work was part of the group show ‘Encounter in resonance‘ at KIOSK, Ghent from the 11th – 22nd december 2021.
The work was developed during the European Postgraduate in Art in Sound at KASK, Ghent under the brilliant coordinators Martine Huvenne & Raf Enckels and the mentorship of Franziska Windisch. Many thanks to the EPAS artists and the Kiosk crew for making the show possible; Simon Delobel, Remie & Anna.
The exhibition was curated by Anne-Laure Camboissier.
Video documentation by @p.sliaupa
Images courtesy of KIOSK & Melissa Ryke