An installation by Danae Stratou, 2010. La Verrière, Fondation d’enterprise Hermès, (Brussels – Belgium). Curated by Alice Morgaine.
Danae Stratou presented the site-specific installation ICESONGS at the exhibition space of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermès ‘La Verriere’, in Brussels. The project was commissioned by the foundation and curated by Alice Morgaine.
Upon entering the space, a primal songlike sound attacks the senses. At first it resembles electronic music; or some mysterious voice, like that of whales. It is the sound of icebergs edges, as they move, break, melt or collide against each other. A square, shallow water tank, located centrally in the space, is fully filled. The whole floor resembles an abstract image, a dark blue square gradually transforming into a bright white, as it reaches the room’s edges. The image is produced from an enlarged satellite image of a random location in Antarctica. The sound is recorded with the use of Cold War technology (super-microphones that used to track nuclear submarines in the South Pacific), so that it enables us to eavesdrop from thousands of miles away as icebergs break off Antarctica’s ice shelf.
An imagined landscape, at once familiar and alien, forges an opportunity to re-visit a vista of the mind where a pre-existing connection between our own Body, Mind and Nature is re-energised.
*Dr Alexander Gavrilov and **Dr Jason Gedamke were kind enough to put together and send to me, many hours of recordings (samples used from 2003 – 2006), of the shifting icebergs’ sounds. These sounds coming directly from the Antarctic Ocean are used to compose the soundscape of the “ICESONGS” installation.*Centre for Marine Science and Technology, Curtin University of Technology
**Marine Mammal Research Program, Australian Antarctic Division
http://www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org/eng-GB/projet/1031/Danae-Stratou-at-La
