Genesis

Category: Sound art performance/installation

Artist：Eric Bribosia, Tan Tan

Performers：Eric Bribosia, Tan Tan, Zhang Liangxuan, Zhan Di, Shi Yanjie, Cai Mengyuan, Song Zhaoyun, Wu Xiaofeng

2014.6

This work has two forms, a sound performance and an installation.

8 loudspeakers circling the space plays 8 voices separately, which are reciting some words of the stories of creation of the world from different traditions (Christianism, Taoism, hinduism, bouddhism, African mythological stories...) in different languages. The voices are from the readers of the culture from which the text is taken (arabic for the Coran, hebrew for the bible...)

The sound art performance on the terrace

At “2014 Sound/Body/Image/Power-Multi-Media Art Festival”, this performance was performed in a closed tent like a “black box”on a terrace. The audience were asked to put eye masks to hide the light, so they sat in the dark at the beginning of the performance. At first, they hear the city noises around them. Suddenly, one voice (recorded) appears from one speaker, very few words, a lot of silence between each sentence, and then, little by little, one voice after another from every speakers makes his entry. With more and more voices appearing, it’s like constructing a choir of speaking voices or a speaking fugue, which becoming more and more dense…While this is happening, live performers wander around the sitting or laying audience, making some sounds (bells, gongs, singing), giving the audience the feeling they are traveling into sound, making the sound travel along their ears, making the sensation of space unclear.At one third of the performance, the performers begin to recite the words first heard through the loudspeakers, and the sounds they were producing are integrated in the soundtrack. At the end, the speaking voices are all produced by the performers, and all the sounds (gongs, bells, plus more and more urban sounds, gradually distorted and amplified…) are played through the loudspeakers.

During the performance, gradually, the roof of the tent was removed little by little, in order to let the light pass more and more. At last, the tent was exposed to the daylight completely, the audience removed their eye masks, and then found themselves were still under a narrow sky surrounded by high buildings, and heard full of noises of the city…

In this very urban jungle that is Wuhan and the K11 neighbourhood, surrounded by cars, constructions noises, electronic sounds and invitations to buy goods, the idea of this performance is to allow the audience, by the means of sound, to go back to the time where nothing of this existed, and to experiment, in a symbolic way,in a short period of time, the creation of the world, from nothingness to now.

After the performance, the 8 speakers stayed in a closed room as a sound installation, waiting for the passengers entering by chance, to start an infinite sound travel...

The sound art installation in the gallery

The stories of genesis and the readers(thank you very much):

<Theogony> By Hesiode (Greece)

Ancient Greek reader：

Xavier Demoulin , male, 65, diplomat，studied classical philology in Brussels

Giotis Damianidis, male, 29, Greek guitar player, lives in Brussels

Story of creation of Atoum (Egypt)

Ancient Egyptian reader：

Françoise Labrique, female, 63, Teacher in egyptology at the university of Köln, Germany, lives between Brussels, Köln and Egypt

<Bilble-Ancient testament>（Israel）

Hebrew reader：

Jim Dratwa, male, 41, head of European Group Ethics, European Commission, lives in Brussels

<Daodejing> by Laozi (China)

Chinese reader：

Tan Tan，female, 32, artist, lives in Wuhan

Fan Peipei, male, 29, Musician, lives in Wuhan

<Rigveda> (India)

Indian reader：

Rushikumar, male, 71, teacher in Darshanam Sanskrit school, lives in Gujarat, India

Hanuma Prasad, male, 52, lives in India

The Big Bang Theory (wikipedia)

Vocal synthesizer reader：

Zarvox, unclear gender, unclear age, lives inside the computer of Eric