SONGLINES.MONTEVIDEO
HOLDING TIME EMBODYING PLACE
I
PLACING – PLAYING SONGLINES
SITE-SPECIFIC LONGSTRING DRUMS
Songlines is an appropriation with which I refer very associatively to the multidimensional spiritual and actual spacial orientation practise of the First Peoples of Australia. I respect their deep-time cultural memory and heritage to which I am an alien and I don´t claim any right to define or interpret their worlds. My use of Songlines is more literal as sonic, sounding lines, strings and site-specific monochords.
Nevertheless these Songlines are also lines of orienting and connecting. They are activated, modulated and sustained through touch in motion. Walking along the vibrating physical line, holding it within the fingers while changing and ajusting pressure in relation to speed, I – and everybody else who does it – listens with the tips and ears to its buzzing harmonics. Saturated songs merge with the acoustic atmosphere of the surroundings and create a specific sonic memory of place and time. Blocking, cutting, violating and erasing a place means also violating and erasing individual and collective memories and practices.
Songlines Montevideo are proposals for sharing a practice. The instruments are an invitation to tune-in and play with a place. To hold time, to enfold and embody space and place through moving sonically – musicaly and somaticaly.
Duo Cristian & Kerstin:
Trio Carsten, Fernando & Pol, tuning-in the abondoned hangar with a mobile speaker unit and the two longstring-drums:
Going to specific places and installing site-specific long-string drums I tried to contribute to the in-situ situations and the connected multi-layered presences by inhabiting possible in-betweens.
Matter in motion
Graininess and granularity of touch
Touching the ground with your feed, with your fingers, open hands, butts, legs and backs
Entering the sliced and enfolding shore lines – violated and poisend
Be and play the porous presence
Not letting go
Like all fishing people inhabiting the gaps of the bay
Temporal embodiments, nomadic skyscrapers that connect to the horizons and the disembodied skylines of Modernity