Pressedossier 2014 EN

www.sound-development-city.com
A Sound Development Project
Sound
Development
City 2014:
Press release
International artists on an expedition
The Swiss cultural initiative Sound Development City
sends, for the third time, a selected group of artists on a three-week
expedition to two European cities. In late summer, the traveling
art studio will embark on a journey to Riga and Helsinki.
Twelve artists working in different disciplines and coming
from different cultural backgrounds are participating in this year’s
expedition.
On the road with Sound Development City, the artists will
work on individual projects, explore new cities and cultural spheres
and expand their network. Temporary interventions in public
spaces are also an integral part of the expedition, as well as workshops and performances, which local artists and art enthusiasts are
invited to join.
The expedition’s team and the participating artists will
provide insights into their artistic positions, work processes and
research progress, which they will share on a specially developed
online logbook and an online radio station.
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Focus: Mind the Gap!
“Mind the Gap!” is the thematic focus of Sound Development City’s
expedition in 2014. The gap is necessary in order to carve out a
proverbial space that can be used creatively and become a new artistic
reality. “Mind the Gap!” is thus understood as an invitation to look
inward and sharpen the senses to subtle in-between states, and to
recognize ruptures, transitions and no man’s lands.
Riga — Helsinki
The Sound Development City expedition will explore the cities
of Riga and Helsinki from August 28 to September 13, 2014. Both cities
share a common privileged location by the sea that has made both
places attractive trade ports already early on. For centuries, sovereignty
over either city has changed time and again, leaving behind distinctive
traces that, to this day, still shape society, politics and economy.
The Sound Development City expedition will inhabit a headquarters in each city for six days, and will carry out artistic interventions
and projects, public performances and workshops from there into
the urban sphere.
Sound Development City will be put into practice in partnership with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Arts in Riga
an the Goethe-Institut Finland in Helsinki.
For more information go to:
www.sound-development-city.com
12 Expedition participants, 11 Research approaches
Participating artists were selected from a total of 344 applicants who
replied to an international open-call. In 2014, twelve artists will
take part in the expedition with some eleven projects. An international selection committee evaluated the applications based on
artistic quality and originality, their relation to the thematic focus
“Mind the Gap!” as well as their research-based approach.
The selected participants hail from eleven different countries and
represent a wide spectrum of artistic positions, biographies and
work methods.
John Grzinich
*1970, US/EE — http://maaheli.ee/main
John Grzinich is a mixed-media artist working primarily
with sound, compositions, performance and site-specific intervention since the early 1990s. For Sound Development City, he has
developed the project “Listening in Context”, which explores the
intimate role sound plays in our perception and the connections we
make to our surroundings through what we hear. The project
outlines a so-called “cartography of hearing” through audio-visual
portraits.
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Vivian Caccuri
*1986, BR — http://www.viviancaccuri.net
Vivian Caccuri engages with language, voice and the
imagination in her work and has collaborated with artists such as
Arto Lindsay and Gilberto Gil. In the project “Silent Walk” she
will guide a group of up to 20 participants through a curated 8-hour
silent meandering through the cities of Riga and Helsinki. The
silence will enhance the ability to perceive the aural surrounding
and thus highlight questions regarding urban development,
privacy, property and intimacy.
Małgorzata Goliszewska
*1985, PL — http://goliszewska.blogspot.com
Documentary film maker Ma gorzata Goliszewska probes
the borders of documentary narratives by focusing on direct
interactions and chance encounters. Her project “Twin” continues
her ongoing artistic research on the notion of sisterhood. By
documenting a 24-hour period of “shadowing” astrological twin
sisters, Ma gorzata questions the meaning of personal biography
and backgrounds.
Andreas Oskar Hirsch
*1972, DE — http://www.HirschOnHirsch.com
Andreas Oskar Hirsch adopts an observing and playful
approach in his practice, mixed with an interest in automated
processes and conceptual considerations. In “What the heck are
they talking about?“ Hirsch will transfer birdcalls into Morse
code – and from there, he will translate them into language, music
and imagery. Hirsch operates under the assumption that birdcalls
are in fact coded messaged. What kind of birds carry what kind
of messages? Which ones lend themselves to musical compositions,
and which ones are better rendered graphically? And what
narratives might develop from this journey?
Richard Eigner
*1983, AT — http://richard.ritornell.at
Richard Eigner is a composer, sound artist, drummer
and producer. In his work, Eigner navigates between experimental
acoustic music, minimalism and electronica. He has worked
together with artists such as Bruce laBruce, Flying Lotus and
Robert Seidel. For Sound Development City, he will conduct subtle
interventions into the urban spaces of Riga and Helsinki. In the
cities’ multifaceted soundscapes, he will react specifically to those
undertones and sounds that provide signals for orientation by
making slight alterations, removing or adding sounds and timbers
in the soundscape.
Rachel S. James
*1984, CA/US — www.racheljames.ca
Rachel S. James is a sound artist and artist-ethnographer.
She investigates emotional states such as profundity, embarrassment and radical seriousness. For Sound Development City, she will
explore the process of how mythologies and societal patterns
are formed. In the work “How to Be a(n) <#$>>“, she will record
descriptions of places, instructions and stories told by local artists.
She will then weave these sound recordings into an investigation
of traditional Latvian and Finnish music, which will be presented
as radio shows.
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YangFan Li
*1981, CN — http://site.douban.com/YF/
In 1998, YangFan Li co-founded China’s first ever all-girl
punk band called Hang on the Box, that recorded two studio and one
live album. In her artistic practice, she works across a range of
media: theater, painting, music, composition, sound and video. In
her project “Trip Jigsaw” she will completely depend on the
conditions during the expedition, and will invent and build a new
self-made music instrument every day of the trip. She will record
music sessions with these instruments using a mobile street studio,
and will accompany the recordings with drawings.
Moritz Wettstein
*1981, CH — www.moritzwettstein.com
Moritz Wettstein is media and performance artist, music
producer and programmer. He works with self-constructed, and
self-programed tools, which he conceives specifically for each
project. With the work “Rap Machine” he explores commonalities
existing in Rap sung in different languages. His focus isn’t the
comprehensibility of the texts, but rather its musical and structural
elements. He will record as many conversations as he can around
Riga and Helsinki, and slice these into rhythmic words and
segments using a self-programmed algorithm. These fragments will
then be put together into a piece in the “Rap Machine”.
Masǎ Drndić
*1982, HR — http://masafilm.wix.com
Maša Drndić is an artist, curator, designer and filmmaker.
She directed several short documentaries and worked on over a
dozen short fiction films. Her works often center on the connections
between places, their inhabitants, identity and sense of belonging.
In “On Nostalgia”, she explores “Baltic nostalgia” with sound, image
and video by looking at artifacts, rituals and places of significance.
By giving visual representation to expressions of a yearning for
the past, the work seeks to show how Finnish and Latvian societies
cope with the challenges of the present.
Tiago Romagnani Silveira & AEAEAEAE
*1983, BR — www.tiagoromagnanisilveira.com
*1988, NO — www.aeaeaeae.io
Artists Tiago Romagnani Silveira and AEAEAEAE share
a similar research approach. During the expedition, the artist duo
will use acoustic impulses to extrapolate geometries and spaces
existing at the edge of perception. They will fill up large objects of
varying density – such as buildings, hills, and empty lots in the
city’s architecture – with sound, thus illustrating a cartography of
resonance, harmonics and sound textures.
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Ruth Lea Danon
*1987, IL — https://www.facebook.com/RuthLDanon
Ruth Lea Danon studied performance and composition in
Israel and the U.S. and has performed as musician in Israel, the
U.S. and the U.K. in her art practice, she engages with the mutability
of structures, and the de- and re-constructions of established
patterns. The project “Tel Aviv – Beirut” tells of the impossible trip
from Israel to Beirut, where she wants to visit a friend. She will
use the expedition from Riga to Helsinki as a symbolic inner
journey from Tel Aviv to Beirut, and will document it in film: Riga
will be Tel Aviv, Helsinki thus becomes Beirut, and the trip will
be a collection of fictitious memories and experiences.
For more information go to:
http://sound-development-city.com
About
Sound Development City is a project initiated by Sound
Development and developed in collaboration with Heller
Enterprises. The project is financed by Sound Development and
organized by Heller Enterprises. Each edition of Sound
Development City takes place in two different cities, and follows
a different thematic focus. Due to its experimental format, the
expedition seeks to provide artists with the opportunity to realize
unconventional, interdisciplinary ideas.
Sound Development
Sound Development is a non-commercial, independent
and privately funded cultural initiative based in Zurich, founded
by Nia Schmidheiny in 2002. Sound Development is a platform
for promotion of, networking of and exchange between artistic and
cultural creators. Sound Development focuses particularly on
fostering personal encounters and collaborations that go beyond the
standard institutional and academic approach. It thus allows for
the unexpected to take place, and promotes culture in the open.
www.sound-development.com
Heller Enterprises
Heller Enterprises initiates, develops, and accompanies
cultural projects of all kinds. Founded in 2003 by Martin Heller, the
company takes an interdisciplinary approach, and carries out
commissioned projects on the intersections of culture, economy
and politics.
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Sound Development City 2013: Expedition Logbook
The participating artists and the team document the
expedition by Sound Development City through images, sound
snippets and texts published on a specially developed online
logbook. At the end of each expedition, a publication is put together
from the collected content.
The 2013 expedition was documented in ten separate booklets. You can find the PDF versions of each artist’s booklet here:
http://sound-development-city.com/2014/publikationen/
Contact:
Duscha Kistler, Project Manager
duscha@sound-development-city.com
Nicholas Schärer, Communication
nik@sound-development-city.com
t +41 (0)79 830 90 93
Heller Enterprises
Giessereistrasse 5, CH-8005 Zurich
t +41 43 233 91 37
f +41 43 233 91 38
www.hellerenter.ch
Images:
Impressions from Sound Development City 2013: Lisbon — Marseille
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Image 1: Malose Malahela „The Third Space“ Audio Walk, Marseille
Image 2: Lucas Norer „The Lisbon Route“ Installation, Marseille
Image 3: Maiden Monsters „The Sound of Crisis“ Performance,
Marseille
Image 4: Wolfgang Dorninger „text2field-recordings“ Workshop,
Lisbon