LIVING BRIDGES An exploration of aspects of the lands bordering the North Atlantic sea. Those aspects will converge hopefully in an interdisciplinary exhibition in Porto, Portugal in 2025 and an exhibit on Iceland.
SUBSTANCE The intention for the residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre is to explore transpersonal psychology and anthropology connected to the land overlooking the North Atlantic Sea. Nature, animism,rituals and traditions around the summer solstice overlooking the North Atlantic Ocean.
MEDIA During my time in Iceland I wanted to record soundscapes from nature for a duration of three months and through Bela twill and the Bela Standard create soundscapes within textiles that I intend to weave on the digital jacquard loom that are triggered through touch using fine silver plated conductive thread cross-pollinating textiles, sound and computational arts. I wanted to work with e textiles and gather material during my stay in the form of soundscapes biophony and geophony with my digital hand recorder on Iceland. I wanted to record the Atlantic Ocean. Wind, the scattering of birds and the spring Sun. I wanted to explore swimming daily throughout my time at the Ós Textile Residency.
I also wanted to take photographs for the ongoing developments that I have made in AYAB knitting in knitting soundscapes and photographs through programming and hacking the domestic Brother 950i alongside daily photographs of the North Atlantic Ocean for the Sound Book of Colour. The colours that we intend to translate into musical scores to the sound of the harp instrument are colours found in Nature from spices, medicinal plants, berries, leafs, nuts, vegetables, flowers and wine. I wanted to stitch the North Atlantic Ocean onto watercolour paper as it seems to me that this is the thread that binds us in Nature as we draw from ecological perspectives in our artistic practises underlying our creative language and expression. It seems more urgent than ever to derive colour from plants, and waste from our kitchen, as the Textile industry alone accounts for much of our pollution. Factories are using heavy toxins to fixate the dyes and heavy chemicals that flow into our seas, killing wildlife and damaging the Earth.
OUTCOME I see the residency as an opportunity to take recordings from nature and dive deeper into our relationship with Nature that I wanted to understand. The developments proposed are experimental and might ultimately stress the basics of raw material.
INITIAL QUESTIONS
As the Earth has a soul, can I document its essence?
Can the soul of particular walks be held and frozen in time through digital photography?
Can colour and sound be a spoken language where they intertwine?
Can the soul of a place be recorded ceremonially like it often is during summer solstice as “rituals establish relationships of obligation that tie humans to the land and the land to the humans who live on it. Instead of human dominion over the landscape, in Animist cosmologies, humans live under the dominion of the landscape around them”? And finally; Can nature be the catalyst in creation and isn’t it often so that nature gives away its essence?
COLLABORATION.
1. I am learning from a parallel project that is ongoing collaboration with harpist Frederica Vieira Campos which is an interdisciplinary collaboration between textiles, music from the harp, and Computational Arts. We are making progress in building bridges between weaving on a loom and playing the harp, between colour derived from nature and sound through Weaving the Air harp, an interactive instrument.
2. The project is also supported by Henrique Ferrara who works in music and interdisciplinary media and is experienced in building musical instruments and exploring computational arts. We plan a final exhibition in Porto, Portugal in the summer 2025. Should my application be successful, it would of course start in Iceland.