Through Shadows and Substance
Multimedia Art Installation, 2018 |
I inhabit between darkness and light, my presence weaving through shadows and substance. The magnitude of this experience reduces me to a minute, silent presence.
Renzo Spiteri, personal diary entry, Sandness, Shetland, July 12th 2018.
When I first arrived on Shetland in April 2018, I was greeted by a canvas of minimal sound textures as I had never experienced before. By the time I left Shetland in July, following the last of three field trips, nothingness had turned into a particular stillness from which so much had emerged. Immersing myself in its natural conditions and phenomena, I felt that, only by then, had I started to embrace the island’s rawness and particular atmosphere.
My experiences while visiting Shetland are unveiled and shared through the multimedia art installation Through Shadows and Substance, and Stillness, a solo performance of sounds, field recordings and electronics..
My experiences while visiting Shetland are unveiled and shared through the multimedia art installation Through Shadows and Substance, and Stillness, a solo performance of sounds, field recordings and electronics..
Through Shadows and Substance (2018)
Multimedia Art Installation
Through Shadows and Substance unveils and shares my experiences while visiting Shetland, through interplay of field recordings, film, sounds and actions. It is a multimedia art installation that documents processes developing, a state of mind in flux, a personal pilgrimage in search of a more significant mode of artistic expression. This work has taken me to unchartered territories not only geographically but also artistically. It represents the materialisation of my personal responses to the particular atmospheres that Shetland embodies, and my presence within them.
Through Shadows and Substance is designed to be experienced as an interplay between three silent video works, three independent headphone tracks and a five speaker audio track that was diffused in the gallery space allowing space for relationships to develop between the videos, headphone stations and speakers.Through Shadows and Substance stretches the idea of fields as spaces that generate indeterminate events, which in turn generate new modes and new creative paths that are always open to possibilities.
Through Shadows and Substance is designed to be experienced as an interplay between three silent video works, three independent headphone tracks and a five speaker audio track that was diffused in the gallery space allowing space for relationships to develop between the videos, headphone stations and speakers.Through Shadows and Substance stretches the idea of fields as spaces that generate indeterminate events, which in turn generate new modes and new creative paths that are always open to possibilities.
Headphone tracks
Bow Improvisation at Pow of Cullingsburgh is a response to listening and engaging with the natural phenomena of my surroundings and using quotidian material (a rusty metal fence) as a way of interacting with the space and sound events around me. The actions seems to follow on the creative processes of Jeph Jerman who, in the liner notes of Animist Orchestra’s 2001 album ‘Wuwei’, writes ‘Attention is on the movement, and the sound becomes then almost incidental’.
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Metal Sheet at Noss Sound explored the idea of materials as new arrivals within a space that act as agents of dynamic change. The reduced interventions from my end open up new possibilities in the subject/object relationship.
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Victoria Pier Storm Hector was a hydrophone recording carried out on the day that Storm Hector’s gale force winds swept across the northern part of Scotland, Orkney and Shetland. The pier at Lerwick responded with a multiplicity of sonic events charged by mixed materials.
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Video work
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Simmerdim is one of three silent video works shown as part of the installation. Through video I wanted to propose a freedom and fluidity that stretches space for the imagination, a phenomenology of imagination. The process, which includes no post-production of any video footage, creates a space where the real and the illusionary play. From a personal perspective, the films are the result of a liberating mind, expressing modes generated from the ecstasies of a particular experiential state that matured because of Shetland and its particular atmospheres- ecstasies preserved in silent imagery, in a personal reflection of the magnitude of this kaleidoscopic mixture of place, space and presence.
Photo gallery
Through Shadows and Substance
First exhibit: October 2018, part of Oxford Festival of the Arts' new series #ENCOUNTERS, with two live performative interventions by Renzo Spiteri, Harriet Butler and Dan Linn-Pearl.
Supported by #EngageCREATIVES, and Sonic Arts Research Centre, Oxford Brookes University.
First exhibit: October 2018, part of Oxford Festival of the Arts' new series #ENCOUNTERS, with two live performative interventions by Renzo Spiteri, Harriet Butler and Dan Linn-Pearl.
Supported by #EngageCREATIVES, and Sonic Arts Research Centre, Oxford Brookes University.