Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City? (2022)
AV DOME VERSION AT FUTURE SOUNDSCAPES, SILENT GREEN KUPPELHALLE, BERLIN, 2022 | PHOTO BY UDO SIEGFRIEDT
AS INSTALLED AT CONNECTED ALIENATION / VERNETZTE ENTFREMDUNG AT CTM FESTIVAL EXHIBITION, GERMANY, 2022 | PHOTO BY ERIC TSCHERNOW
Ale Hop, audiovisual installation, 2022 »Why is it They Say a City Like Any City?« is an audiovisual installation premiered at CTM 2022 Exhibition »Connected Alienation/Vernetzte Entfremdung« at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. In parallel, the music pieces contained in the AV piece were edited as an LP album by Karl Records. Furthermore, it was screened as a stereo A/V piece at Taipei’s festival “Minimal Input – Algorithmic Art Gathering,” held from 1st to 3rd July 2022 at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, and presented in AV dome projection format at Future Soundscapes festival in Berlin.
The piece was conceived in a context of immobility, and imagines a hallucinatory journey along South American territories, through sound and visual vignettes created in collaboration with thirteen musicians around the world, as well as with the AI artist Moises Horta who used an AI tool used to »translate« and »misstranslate« speech into image, creating different temporalities and points of view.
During the lockdown months, with the idea of challenging the digital technological resources that appear to dilute distances, Ale Hop started a process of remote collaboration by sending messages posted from various cities in South America to thirteen artists. In the messages, she journaled her impressions of familiar places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time, sound, cosmovision, and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians (Ana Quiroga, Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M’balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño, KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Nicole L’huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello) summoned by the artist were asked to respond with sound collaborations.
Created by Ale Hop in collaboration with Ana Quiroga, Concepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M’balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño, KMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L’huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau, Tomas Tello.
Supported by the Akademie der Künste with funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of the Neustart Kultur programme.
AV DOME VERSION AT FUTURE SOUNDSCAPES, SILENT GREEN KUPPELHALLE
AS INSTALLED AT CONNECTED ALIENATION / VERNETZTE ENTFREMDUNG AT CTM FESTIVAL EXHIBITION, GERMANY, 2022
Taiwan C-Lab / Minimal Input – Algorithmic Art Gathering, Taiwan, 2022
Field recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms and voices, all the sound collaborations featured in the exhibition piece Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City? were also assembled into the six sonic vignettes that make up the LP released by the Berlin-based label Karlrecords. They wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience. Expect no answers to the album’s title question, but an innermost psychedelic rumination.
“Despite the technological resources that appear to dilute distances, the simulation of closeness mirrored on the digital space is an emptied body, a state of precarity, a flat surface; unable to withhold an experience of exchange,” Ale states. “So, I began this project by asking myself, how can we escape from the reduced experience of the virtual? The idea behind this experiment was that my messages and the places they describe could drive the composition, be a catalyzer, a score. Thus, to use geography as a tool to remember and imagine, to allow new soundscapes to emerge.”
“Memory, diffuse and divergent, sometimes reaches out to the future in its search for form, taking shape from the reflections and echoes that come back … like throwing a rock in a pond and having a rock thrown back at you.”
Released February 15, 2022
Produced and mixed by Ale Hop
Mastered and vinyl cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Berlin
Album illustrations by José Vera
The vinyl edition is available on Bandcamp.
Date
November 1, 2022
