Sound Art Sunday [full]

For a second time, the FIBER Festival’s Sound Art Sunday will give wide exposure to sound art performances by artists from the Netherlands and Belgium. Expect a series of short acts, and one longer hybrid performance, at the intersection of sound, installation art, instrument design, dance and theatre in different rooms of the Brakke Grond.

Airchoir No.1 (Performance) by Anouk Kellner 

Anouk Kellner is a sound artist and composer based in Belgium. Her interest in the church organ instrument is something that appears frequently in her latest work. Blending this with new technologies and experimentation, she wants to create sonic worlds, exploring textures and storylines.

With Airchoir, Kellner explores the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, between human emotion, religion, and electronics. The project brings together audio, textiles, and technology in a mesmerising installation. While a second version of the Airchoirs already exists, this piece returns to the essence of the concept: eight inflatables that breathe in and out like living lungs. They make their voices heard through the 8 organ pipes to which they are connected. Like a choir, these inflatables resonate and interfere with one another. Their programmed compositions always sound different, shaping an ever-changing soundscape that shifts depending on the visitor’s position in the space.

The Airchoir represents a duality within ourselves— longing for connection in an increasingly technological world. At the same time, it evokes echoes of our religious past, reimagining the organ and uncovering new sonic textures within its pipes.

ÉCLIPSIS (Performance) by Vica Pacheco

Vica Pacheco is a Mexico born, Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist, practicing experimental music, composition, ceramics, and 3D animation. Her work, often described as eclectic and energetic, explores mythological crossbreeding and interactions between human and non-human. She employs a syncretic approach, blending pre-Hispanic, archaic, and contemporary technologies with heterogeneous elements to create immersive sound performances and installations.

How can we celebrate both light and darkness? During ÉCLIPSIS, Vica Pacheco will orchestrate a choreographic musical score that invites the audience on an emotional sonic journey. Crafted through body gestures, dance and the evocative sounds of clay instrument bodies. It will be a celebration of both existence and death, inviting the audience to immerse themselves in a sonic fable, guided by their own mental images and memories.

Light is fundamental to our existence. It defines our tangible world and reveals our place in the universe. Yet, light coexists with darkness, which evokes thoughts of the womb, the night, death, fear, and silence. This relationship is beautifully mirrored in the performance, using the seed as a symbol to illustrate its need for darkness to sprout and light to flourish.

ÉCLIPSIS is a co-production by STUK, Botanique & Les Halles de Schaerbeek, de Brakke Grond & FIBER.

iMac Music (Live AV) by Jonathan Chaim Reus

12 years after artist Jonathan Reus performed iMac Music at the Rode Zaal of the Brakke Grond, FIBER Festival is honored to invite him back to the exact same spot for a new version of his iconic performance. It was originally performed at the second edition of Coded Matter(s) – FIBER’s discontinued series on the influence and rise of creative coding practices and critical forms of engineering.

More than a decade later, the performance has only increased in relevance: less and less are we able to access and alter the seamless functioning digital machines and systems that fully mediate our lives (and eat our planet). iMac Music is a performative rewilding of both the soft- and hardware of an early 1999 iMac G3 computer – the first model of the groundbreaking all-in-one series which gave a global boost to cultural production.

The performance is an intimate and fragile spectacle between an end user and their obsolete machine, producing sound and rhythms in whatever ways possible. The circuitry becomes increasingly corrupted through manipulations, visual distortions are created on-screen and sound material is tapped from the running machine.

With a growing interest in the reuse possibilities of (so-called) obsolete technologies to counter e-waste impact, iMac Music is a powerful and present-day story about the possibility of breaking through the barriers that shield us from the raw and wild matter of our technological world.

GRUNT (Performance) by Diane Mahín

How to relate to a human being who can only interact via an apparently wild and primal sound? In GRUNT, the audience meets a woman who communicates solely through growling. The growler navigates various moods, portraying what seems to be an urgent story to be told or an intimate conversation to be held. While she attempts to tell a joke, the audience is met with dark, trauma-laden growls, turning humor into a shadowy reflection. When she reaches out tenderly, all she can express is violence.

What begins as an awkward encounter full of innocent misunderstandings gradually escalates into a desperate need for connection. The vocalisations transform from deliberate attempts to communicate into involuntary, visceral outbursts, culminating in a violent expulsion of sound.

Diane Mahín is a Dutch-Iranian performance maker and sociologist. She makes performative worlds in which image and sound are the driving forces. Working with sound reflects her desire to be faced with highly subjective, confrontational and immersive forms of reality. Inspired by the distorted vocals of Death Metal, Diane began growling a year ago, studying under professional Metal singers. She scrutinises the human body as a material object in order to dissect social constructions, as she wishes to grasp their absurdity and humor. Death and nothingness form the underlying motives of her work.

The people at FIBER Festival have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘Sound Art Sunday” in the subject line + your name in the email.