There’s No There There

Klangperformance im Großen Wasserspeicher

Thursday, 21st November, 2024
Großer Wasserspeicher
Belforter Str.
10405 Berlin

Doors: 06:30 PM
Start: 07:00 PM (on time)
Entrance: donation-based (suggested range: 12-15 €)

“If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries, fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, “The House of Asterion”

“There’s No There There” is a site-specific sonic performance and installation by Elisabetta Porcinai, Marie Gailey, Dylan Kerr and Davide Luciani. A piece for three voices and electronics leveraging the unique resonant properties of Berlin’s Großer Wasserspeicher, a former water reservoir.

As in the sense intended by Gertrude Stein, the title alludes to a discrepancy with the real – a space of potentiality rather than inconsistency. The Großer Wasserspeicher acts as a boundary for sound, but also as a precondition for its existence in a particular phenomenological manifestation in space and time. The absence of water leaves a void that is filled with its own resonance: particles of silence that are ignited by the slightest spark of sound. A space in which sonic chimeras move like the fluid that once filled the labyrinthine corridors of the reservoir, changing their state until they dissipate like vapor.

The performance consists of two complementary parts that merge into one another as performers and audience move through the space. Three voices gradually multiply and overlap until a soundscape of suspended overtones gradually dissolves into synthetic abstraction. The progressive disintegration of a voice that once was, leaves room for the projection of mirages, suggestions, fears, desires, in a closed circuit that inevitably goes back to the itself.

The event was organized in collaboration with Stray Signals and made possible thanks to Förderband e.V. Kulturinitiative Berlin

Stray Signals: https://www.straysignals.net/
Elisabetta Porcinai: https://elisabettaporcinai.com/
Davide Luciani: https://www.davideluciani.com/
Dylan Kerr: https://www.instagram.com/dylan__kerr/
Marie Gailey: https://www.instagram.com/m_requa/