Photography：pier carthew
In what condition would you carefully listen to sounds at home? From the bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, living room, garage to warehouse, when you’re alone, with your eyes open or close, you might be able to use senses other than the auditory to perceive natural sounds in the environment or echoes from your heart humming in the space. Located in one old apartment in a quiet alley in Melbourne, Domicile is an experimental performance hosted by Aviva Endean and New Music Network from 12/4 to 12/6. The aim of this performance is to evoke subtleties of sound in the close range of the audience so as to make the audience feel a series of intersecting vectors of the body, people, families and lifestyles. Taking advantage of the different spatial configuration in the place, the performance invites the audience to come into one or another room at a specific time. However, the show is punctuated not by the entry of the audience, but by the performer him- or herself. When the audience moves in and out, the performance would not be interrupted. In other words, the audience is almost turned into a peeping tom, accidentally, who snatches a peek into the ordinary life of the performer; in another sense, the experience is also like walking into a film. The work is composed by sound performances weaved through instruments, language, images, body movements and interactive gadgets. The audience has to listen carefully to see how this series of performances is homely and intimate as well as lonely and distanced, as if the soundscape itself is molded upon a protective shell.
Photography：Dale Gorfinkel
The Self-Exploration of Open Space
Entering the exhibition space of Domicile, the first space is the living room as the most open and noisy environment. However, Aviva Endean's film 'A face like yours' (filmed by Christie Stott) plays on TV, inviting the audience to put on earplugs and follow the instructions in the video. In the process, the audience can imitate other people’s actions to feel the endoscopic sounds of the body, realizing the dynamic rhythm weaved by the hand touching the face. Next to the living room is the garage in which we find a dance performance, ? Corporel, choreographed by Vinko Globokar. Through their monstrous faces and rapturous sounds of rupture, the audience can feel the friction of body movement, its subtle reverberation. The neighboring storage space has the installation art, Baby Boomer, by Dale Gorfinkel. Inspired by our daily walking, using the plastic funnel to replace the amplifier, the piece uses people’s motion to active the pump in the apparatus, pushing the air into other reverberating instruments and making noises. The audience can use their hands to adjust the volume and the speed of their ambulation can also change the texture of the sound. The installation makes use of all kinds of recycled materials to generate chaotic environmental sounds, like a toy, to relax people.
With the raucous sounds from the storage space, the audience returns to the living room. There, Aviva Endean plays Lehadlik with her clarinet; the elegant rhythm swells in the space, accompanied by the blinking of candle lights. When the performance comes to an end, she walks to the second floor and the audience turns into the room next to the stairs. Matthias Schack-Arnott plays Wojtek Blecharz's piece blacksnowfalls, drumming with live photography and projection. His hands, softly touching the surface of the drums, seem to be finding the texture of sounds.
Photography：pier carthew
Intimate Space and Dialogue
Moving upstairs with Aviva Endean, the audience sees how she interacts with Alexander Gellmann in a collaborative piece, Vold. The two of them kisses each other with microphones, whose close contact with another receiving end causes a lot of static. This dynamic symbolizes intimate relationships in the sense that people project and introject each other’s momentum, transmitting a sense of intimacy with high-pitched counter-aggression. In contrast, in the bathroom, there is Georges Aperghis’s Conversation. Two girls in the tub talk to each other with different tones and mumbling. Even though they are close together, this piece implies that our ordinary conversation is always misinterpretation, signaling the gap between the intimate bodies and the separation of thoughts.
Photography：pier carthew
What kind of dynamic is essential to a family? How much do you understand your family member, lover or roommate even if you live together, judging from the interaction in the public and private spaces? Marcel Proust one said that “you don’t need new landscapes, you need new eyes.” This aural performance invites you to enter an antiquated but warm space. Through your full body synesthesia, such as visual reception to sound production or sound trembles to excitements in the body, you feel the interior world in each of these spaces, crowdedly. When intimacy develops to a limited degree, no matter between family members or lovers, can we break through spatial thresholds via experiments to connect to each other with new interaction, or to see the landscape of home with a new eye? Certainly, there is nothing new about this exhibition, but its aural configuration explores the sense of self and opens a new path to other foreign sensations.