Photo courtesy of Henrietta Muller, Nia Konstantinova, Rotterdam, Worm, September 2020

 

100 small sounding circuits hang from above at different heights (170~>210cm from the ground), arranged in the space in no particular order; each circuit has a small speaker and sings a sound (whistles, buzzes, hums, high pitched noises, hisses). Each sound depends, in terms of pitch or intensity, on the amount of light, every circuit has a photo-resistance disrupting the synthesis of the sound.

The natural light shapes the soundscape, smoothly changing along with the daytime and eventually disrupted by the movement of people around, during the dark hours, light from a few lightbulbs on the ground is shaded by any person standing in the area, causing a reaction in sounds.

Such an amount of light sensors detect and refects on sound any small change of shades and circuits noticeably react to the movement of a person a few meters away.

 

Life indisputably developed on a path distancing ourselves from a so-called natural environment. While the basic concept of what nature is, will forever be a rich ground for disputes, no one can deny that how we shape our homes and artifacts in industrialized countries, reminds us very vaguely of what once was a symbiosis with the environment. On the contrary, we’ve searched for, and created phenomenal tools to cheat the real weather, stop the growth of plants or flatten the biodiversity to be around animals that either serve us a purpose or are too small and insignificant to make us any damage. How much is too much? Can humans flourish having only representations of what before was part of us? Posters, documentaries, games, all together in a make-believe version of interaction to an ecosystem. “Thicket” stage a fake biophony, a dumb imitation of a population of sounding birds and insects by mean of the most refractory and residual technological obsolete device. Natural soundscapes changes with different times of the day, fading between different timbres and sound aggregation processes, instantly reacting to the approach of humans: the same mechanism is represented as simple as that. The installation may be perceived as a grotesque parody of the approximated representations of nature such as aquariums or plastic fowers: cheap beauty from inappropriate imitation of nature, represents the sound of the guilt of humankind towards nature, a space where technology fails an attempt to create comfort and provides a disturbing distorted representation of the world.