Turbulence Studies: Latent Amongst the Air 10/10 (Reflection)
Performative installation @ MACA, NDSM, Amsterdam - MAY 26, 28, 29, 2022
The space and the surrounding sounds
An old shipyard now turned into one of the most bustling district for arts and entertainment in Amsterdam, NDSM, where MACA is located, was full of different kinds of sounds: the ferries dividing water, rain, wind, boat engines, motors, milling machines, locals partying on their boat to a loud music, tourist bachelor parties on beer bikes, little kids yelling and so on. Mundane yet interestingly mismeshing, the daily soundscape of the place could speak of the current state of NDSM as well as any history book or social studies could tell. So in between installing the project and making composition indoors in the project space at MACA, I took walks around the area with a recording device and tried to capture the sonic sceneries for a bit. Roaming around the neatly lined up container boxes where architecture and design offices are now housed, repainted graffities and street art museums, and large festival sites that was surprisingly left empty during the time of the residency, I suddenly had a nostalgia that doesn’t belong to my memory. And I wondered where this nostalgia might be from. There still was a glimpse of what this place once was like, although the cultural and social gentrification has re-presented and re-painted the area completely for the past 20 years. I realized this strangely parallels with Turbulence Studies’ artificial weather-making process as well as the attraction to the dark melancholy and bizarreness of these unreal yet such real sceneries. Both Turbulence Studies and NDSM bears a fictional yet very much real landscape and I wanted to hint this somehow. In the beginning and the ending of Latent Amongst the Air’s sound composition, a small snippets of these recordings repeat as a semi-artificial atmosphere that invites the outdoor environment that conditions the room to a congruent tone before the composition takes off to more pictorial and written out sonic journey.
“By the open air and the view to the Ij, contrasting characteristics and histories coincide in and around MACA. It calls for emergence of ingenuity and new experiences to take place”
Iris, MACA’s floor and general manager, asked for a one-liner impression of the space for PR purposes on social media after my residency and this is what I ended up handing into her. Although it was composed on a whim with much of post-deinstallation fatigue, I still think that it describes my first impression of MACA as a space and how I tried to incorporate its surroundings in “Latent amongst the Air”.