Synergie Résonante

Synergie résonante is a multimodal spatial installation. Five sculptural ceramic objects are placed in the room, four on the surrounding walls and one suspended from the ceiling at its centre. The objects are formations built organically from casts of faces. Inside them are nine ceramic flutes in all. Fans seated at their mouthpieces, controlled by microcontrollers, set them sounding and play back a soundscape composed for the room. Over twenty minutes the sound develops dynamically between very delicate, quiet tones and intense passages in which the flutes play with one another harmonically, and also dissonantly.

At the centre of the room, beneath the suspended sculpture, lies the Listening Pit: a nest-shaped reclining landscape with an opening to one side and a carpet as its floor. It is composed of several connected elements built on a styrofoam substructure padded with foam and fabric. Its form recalls mountain ranges or bone formations, whose organic curves and hollows invite one to lean back and sink in.

In the reduction of colour, in the forms playing off one another and in the soundscape spreading among them, an atmosphere forms that in its harmonic moments invites lingering and submersion. In contrast, the composition also builds tension in its dissonant tones — a pressing intensity in which the ceramics appear like wasps’ nests from which the sound threatens to fall upon the listener. As those penetrating tones break open and turn towards gentler sounds, a sense of release arises, a breathing out, in which one finds one’s way back to a quiet within.

Synergie résonante shapes a room in whose presence one can be with oneself and also with others, a room that makes shared perception possible. A room for collective experience and exchange, and equally a surface onto which one may project and experience oneself as an individual.

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