Breathing Walls (2005)
Sound installation
Collaborative project with “Syntax Error?” (Yorgos Konstantinidis, Thalia Ioannidou, Marina Gioti)
Breathing Walls is a site specific sound installation, designed for a hotel room. It is the fruit of the collaboration between a musician/ performer, an architect and a filmmaker under the moniker ‘Syntax Error?’.
The hotel room, is a particular private space which has to house numerous temporary residents, and in this work it is seen as a vessel of their experiences and stories. If its walls had ‘ears’ they would absorb sounds of the room’s history. If they had a voice they would emit sounds and stories of lesser or greater human dramas, boring everyday chit chat, business deals and love stories.
“Breathing Walls” is a room of which the walls not only have ears, they also have a chattery mouth. A living organism, which breathes in sounds from the past, only to breathe them out in the present, secretly emitting the acoustic memory of the room.
The room is devoid of furniture and apparently silent. The sounds and conversations of the past guests are ‘locked’ inside the walls, at the disposal of the exhibition visitor who has to trace them. In order to do so, the visitor is offered a stethoscope, an acoustic medical device used to listen to the internal sound of a living body. As she is moving the chest piece on the wall surface, the visitor is browsing through the chain of stories scattered inside the walls of the room. The visitor becomes an acoustic voyeur of the room’s sonic history. The stethoscope is the aural equivalent of the ‘peephole’ to a private world.
The preparation of the installation started a week before the opening. Conversations and sounds were recorded by volunteer voice actors, inside the room, with its original furniture. Some of the conversations were scripted, others were improvised.
A month later, at the closure of the exhibition the installation had to be taken down. The demolition process was acted by the artists as a performance, a loose reference to the last scenes of F.F. Coppola’s “The Conversation”, where the protagonist, a surveillance expert, who is wire tapping others and monitors their conversations, under the suspicion that his home is wiretapped, he tears up the walls in order to find the listening device.
Exhibition
– Visions—Kappatos Gallery at Athens Imperial Hotel, Athens, Greece (project curated by Maria Roussou)