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Siri Austeen (b. 1961) is a graduate of the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts. Her artistic practice is often based on investigative field recordings and long-term projects that involve the interaction between individual, collective and ecological structures. She explores these connections through sound installations, text, performance and public art commissions.
Considerations on transformation
Excerpt from diary – walking in a sand depot.
Out of the prism of intimacy, transformation casts shadows, you think and you write this down: whim upon whim settles like damp bundles of grass, newly fallen hedgerows on your forehead right at the place where the mountainside begins to slope upwards where you walk – sand and stone give way in small depressions with each step, and now you wonder: is this piling up with the intention of carrying, yes almost lifting you further upwards – or is every single depression in the ground dismembered pieces of a collective movement, which at any time, and with full force, can trigger a warned landslide.
"Stretch out your arm and let it represent the history of the Earth, where the birth of the Earth took place at the shoulder. The Cambrian and complex life forms begin at the wrist, the Age of Mammals (the last 66 million years) begins at the outermost joint of the middle finger, and the history of man is so short that it can be erased with a small rasp of a nail file."
- John McPhee, Basin and Range (Farrar, Straus And Giroux, 1981)
This metaphor touches the inner life of the project. Not only as a reminder of our short time on earth, our vulnerability, but of our adopted position, between being nature and losing nature.
During the work I have had a processual focus, listening to how different materials, experiences, discoveries, flotation, noise, sand flight, encounters, magnetite, sonic mapping and wanderings have taken their own place in an ongoing, self-organized topography. The dogma has been to listen in over time.
With recording equipment, I have followed Titania's operations from mountain to fjord – from blasting rock and moving masses, via processing, crushing and grinding, to extraction, flotation and separation, further through the drying plant and up to the shipment of raw materials at the fjord.
The scales are overwhelming, as is the experience of a mountain being reduced to powder. The reverberation lingers in the body.
The compositional work begins with the recording. The quality and perspective of the sounds are colored by the choice and use of different microphone types. This has resulted in a broad sonic palette, which now forms the basis for a new sound work for the exhibition Avgang/deponi .
MORE FROM WASTE / DEPOSIT :
KNUT PETTER NETLAND / titania
SIMON DANIEL TEGNANDER WENZEL / visual artist
LISA TORELL / visual artist