TMKM
Artistic Research
The Voices of Stones (kivien ääniä)
The first performance of the matter-as-collaborator series was performed at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (FI) on October 15. 2020 as part of the event Sounds Like Performance_Now.
The Voices of Stones is a performance about entanglements, points of intensity and encounters, regarding stones as collaborators; having their own voice and own sound, in a dynamic process of co-creation. The artist moves with the stones, activates and relates to them, responds to their sounds and let them give sound. Action and response are creating a feedback-loop of mutual dependence as well as it activates the surroundings, its surfaces, and acoustics.
The Voices of Stones is grounded in the creation of affective relations. In new materialist theory and philosophy the non-human is regarded as also having agency, which in this performance is to view the performing bodies as multiple, and to include the body of the human performer as well as stones and other elements that they perform with. It is crucial how these human and non-human bodies are responding to, moving, and sounding together through the use of both acoustics and electronics.
The artist Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen has had a lifelong relation to stones. The artistic inclusion of stones as an active participant and agent began in Iceland in 2015 with the development of the first Body Interfaces performances and in the creation of stone scores. The Voices of Stones is in this way based on a longer work with relation and becoming as a focus-point in performance art, where agent materials, here stones, are regarded as participators for the artist.
Body Interfaces
Body Interfaces (2015-ongoing) discusses the body's critical potential as an analysing tool and affective apparatus. It began in Iceland with a series of interventions in rural nature that had an ecological awareness inscribed.
In Body Interfaces, the site-specific is an important element, advocating for local environmental awareness, where the body related to different surfaces and natural elements, creating dialogues with human and non-human entities. A departure point for the Body Interfaces concept came from architectural theorist Branden Hookway’s Interface (2014), which started a reflection on the layers of interaction in the interface experience with a strong focus on the ontology of the term which together with the artist's own experimentation with the body in different contexts started the foundation of this project.
Link to selected documentation from first part of Body Interfaces in Iceland, 2015
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