Sound of Topography: The Bells of Prague (The Lighthouse Choir)
Prague Quadrennial: Space Exhibition
Artistic Research Project : Talk and Walks
June 2015, Prague, CZECH REPUBLIC
The Lighthouse Choir was a project born from a spatial experimentation and improvisation workshop in a lighthouse on the island of Homlungen in southern Norway. The musical improvisation carried out by several members of the workshop, was a conversation with our nocturnal environment, since darkness was dominant in December and the different frequencies and light qualities of the lighthouses around us generated a strong curiosity related to the maritime navigation network, of which our own lighthouse was a part. By conducting further research towards the logistics and communication involved in nautical map reading and lighthouse interpretation, our project was invited to participate in the Prague Quadrennial, in the SPACE category. One of the requirements of said invitation consisted in the adaptation of the invited projects to the context of the city of Prague. This would take the form of a guided walk through the city, as well as a project talk open to the public. It is here that the second format of this project called The Sound of Topography was conceived: The Bells of Prague. This aspect of the project proposed a way of navigating the city based on the sound of bell towers, with the historic center of Prague being known in ancient times as The City of 100 Spires, most of these being church towers. We invited the public to visit a bell tower and the art of ringing the bells (the Individual), on another occasion we made an invitation to the Astronomical Tower at 12 pm on a Sunday to appreciate the concert of bells around the city (the Collective ). And finally, we offered an app that interacts with the position of the walker and activates the sound of the closest bell towers, thus proposing another interpretation of the city (the Virtual). The two manifestations of this project deal with issues of navigation, network systems, situational awareness and the reading of space through sound.
A project in collaboration with Anna Krtičková and Ann Mirjam Vaikla.
https://soundcloud.com/natalia-orendain/sets/the-lighthouse-choir-in-the-prague-quadrennial
http://aporee.org/maps/work/projects.php?project=lighthousechoirbells
