(After) Chambers

In the context of the exhibition Une musique intérieure (Conduct, Language, Voice, Inner Ears) (February – April 2022 at Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain), where I presented the piece The gap all else being equal, the curator Pierre Bal-Blanc asked me to coordinate the activation of Alvin Lucier’s Chambers (1968), which he would also like to include in the exhibition. Chambers is a work that consists of « moving large and small resonant environments ». The piece invites us to listen to recordings of large resonant spaces (such as a stadium) in medium or small objects, considered as small resonant spaces (such as a teapot).

I accepted on the condition that I added a constraint other than acoustic in the choice of environments. My proposal wished to give to hear an imbrication of spaces, but also of functions, sites and positions, like so many chambers susceptible to enter in resonance. As Lucier underlines in this work, listening to an environment through another implies renewing one’s relationship to listening. It is not so much a question of listening to an object, a subject or an event, but a relation, to apprehend the listening itself as a relation attaching itself to « simple or complex » relations. The relations are here extended from acoustics to politics and economy. The spaces recorded are those of the headquarters and architectural buildings of the sponsorships of the Tabakalera art center. The small resonant spaces are personal objects that I asked each member of the art center’s executive board to entrust to me for the duration of the exhibition. Finally, the performance consisted of a procession in which the different people in charge of the art center each carried their object inside which the recording of one of the sites resonated, from their office to the exhibition space where the objects were then placed on the ground.

The project was prepared prior to the exhibition during a workshop with students, conducted with Xabier Erkizia. In view of its distance from the source score, the performance is renamed (After) Chambers.