Linda Fredriksson at Poselli, Rauma, photos: Diego Casiraghi
1st Riga Biennial, photos: Vladimir Svetlov
Sara Milazzo at RIBOCA 1, Riga
1st Riga Biennial, Riga, photos: Peteris Viksna
2018
custom made objects, musicians
Flatlands centres on three musical instruments located in caricatures or animated films depicting fictional musical instruments. The work appropriates and reinterprets the images of the instruments in the form of actual three dimensional objects, thereby underlining the materiality of objects of visual representation, as well as associations awakened by matter and material.
Originating from different eras and vastly different contexts, the instruments carry strong political overtones. The ‘glass harmonica’, taken from a 1960s Soviet animation is seemingly a cross between an organ and a harp. It is presented as oppositional to bureaucracy, to restrictions of the freedom of speech and to other societal structures that oppress individual thought. Musical instruments are also culturally valorised, as demonstrated by Warner Brothers’ animation from the 1930s. A pastiche comprised of a questionable blend of genres and styles, the film with its colonial undertones shows a jazz piano as an instrument made of bamboo and built by an imaginary indigenous people. Another example of conservatism and cultural reactionism is the early twentieth-century cartoon that mocks Mahler’s experimental Sixth Symphony through the depiction of imaginary percussion instruments made of everyday objects.
Flatlands explores issues of representation on several temporal and conceptual levels while also questioning the conventions of the presentation of art.
During its life span a different set of musicians will bring the piece to life by playing the instruments, as they wish. The way they will interpret these objects and the kind of sounds that will be produced will be up to the musician. Therefore, during the performances, the breadth of musical material channeled through these objects varies from abstract sound to all kinds of music both contemporary and historical, both improvised and programmed. The instruments are paradoxical and ambiguous. The theme of silencing is an integral aspect of the imagery addressed in the work, making sound and thereby also hearing, listening and being heard, the primary methods of reception of the piece.
Commissioned by the Lönnström Art Museum, Rauma