Permanente Präsentationen, 12. bis 14. Oktober 2023
Christopher Delaurenti: Favorite Intermissions
Klanginstallation
Eröffnung: 12. Oktober 2023, 19:00
Favorite Intermissions
Secretly recorded at orchestral concerts across the country, Favorite Intermissions teems with unusual soundscapes, startling (and unintended) collective improvisations, and surprising, sometimes gritty sonic detail from the sacred space of the concert hall. All of the recordings on Favorite Intermissions are unedited with no overdubs of any kind.
Präsentiert vor und zwischen den konzertanten Beiträgen in Nebenräumen des echoraum.
Christopher Delaurenti
About what I do: My work, the offspring of my love affair with sound, incorporates murky atmospheres, everyday speech, and unusual field recordings.
I bear witness to current crises which impel me to respond. I also heed my impulse to conjure sonic places where raw emotion, memory, and imagination find refuge to dream. More:
To listen is to liberate. I start with myself, taking my microphones towards and sometimes beyond the boundaries of property, the law, and oppression. I make field recordings, but I’m not interested in capturing a place or building a documentary archive. When I tape small microphones to my skull, or button up a stout vest with sewn-in mics, or strap a stereo pair to my homemade mic boom, I am venturing into the world to ask, “Who is heard?” “Who has?” “Who is here?” and “Why are we listening to this right now?” I ask these questions to open my ears and open my heart. Can I listen bravely? Can I hear justice?
I attempt to bear witness to current crises. Activist Sound is one way I describe the sound pieces, performances, and installations I sculpt from field recordings of protests, testimonies, and other pertinent sonic materials of social change. War, poverty, inequality, racism, and climate change impel me to respond.
Activist Sound works such as N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999, and Fit the Description (Ferguson 9-13 August 2014) depict and demand what Marcus Zagorski calls “a critical resistance to the existing order; the preservation of subjective freedom; and the expression of the individual before the abyss of the administered world.” Doubt damns my every step. I try to fight continually and fail. Sometimes I surrender, instead finding and conjuring electroacoustic utopias where trauma, dread, and memory find refuge to dream.
But I never stop asking: Does what we hear – and, crucially, how we listen – harbor the power to suspend and discover alternatives to the silent social and political assumptions which implicitly guide our lives? To borrow a title from Deleuze, my imperative is to make those inaudible forces audible.