A dozen casually dressed performers animate Hamburger Bahnhof’s central corridor, main guests across the curious topography as they stage a collection of stay tableaus or vignettes – repeatedly punctuated by polyphonic singing and semi-poetic speech. An imposing sand dune has been implanted into the area, and some of them stand atop it, greedy at handfuls as if seeking one thing. Their actions should not frantic, however exact and methodical. One in all them out of the blue abandons the excavation challenge and begins to slowly roll down the facet of the dune. Reaching the underside and persevering with to roll throughout the ground, they’re finally picked up by two others, carried ceremoniously up a winding ramp and set atop a raised platform subsequent to a prominently displayed agate stone. The particular person and the massive stone seem on the identical stage, and a form of duet between them begins, enhanced by the sound of one other performer buzzing a brief Bach excerpt.
Alexandra Pirici’s ‘Attune’ at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet)
This is only one small a part of Alexandra Pirici’s Attune, the artist and choreographer’s largest work to this point, co-commissioned by Hamburger Bahnhof and Audemars Piguet Up to date, which supported the challenge from its inception. Within the buttressed corridor of the previous practice station, with its spectacular windowed-wall as a backdrop, Pirici has created what she describes as an itinerary or parcours that looks like a panorama. Performers will activate the area for 4 hours every day of the exhibition’s run, with a choreography that loops 3 times over. Most components of the motion are fastened, however some stay fluid and topic to the performers’ improvisation and consonance with each other.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet)
Nonetheless playful or summary Pirici’s choreographies could seem, they’re usually grounded in intensive analysis and a want to deal with pressing political questions. For her, rigour and playfulness should not rigidly distinct inventive strategies: the success of Attune lies within the solidarity it creates between storytelling and scientific inquiry.
Pirici explains that she ‘meant Attune to be a celebration of the continuum between the animate and the inanimate… I imagine that continuum ought to be celebrated as a result of it actually situates us throughout the bigger cloth of the world, fabricated from the identical matter, belonging to the identical universe.’
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet)
Attune stresses the significance of listening to totally different voices, each human and non-human. The polyphonic refrain, impressed by Georgian or Corsican people songs, fills the huge area and attracts guests right into a meditation on the need of acknowledging our place in a multi-perspectival world. Polyphony, Pirici notes, is difficult for the trendy ear, which is so targeted on the person voice – it takes a thought-about stage of engagement to each carry out and distinguish the multiplicity of voices.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet)
The sound of the performers singing additionally sometimes intervenes straight within the chemical processes going down on the chrome steel set up mounted within the area, which Pirici has dubbed the ‘Organ’. Referencing its half in a bigger system, or organism, in addition to its resemblance to the musical instrument, this vegetal-like construction has glass cylinders hanging from its branches, which comprise totally different experiments. Because the performers sing their ‘Organ songs’, the color and composition of the substances modifications, including one other layer to the interspecies collaboration at work within the piece.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet)
Putting human our bodies in direct dialogue, or refrain, with natural and inorganic matter, Attune attracts our consideration to the self-organising impulses that exist, not simply in human communities but in addition, and importantly, amongst seemingly inert supplies. By listening to the capability of our surrounding setting to be each lively and artistic, we will acquire a renewed sense of our personal propensity for cooperation. Attune, Pirici insists, presents us with an ‘invitation to harmonise’.
(Picture credit score: Jacopo La Forgia)
Attune, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, till 6 October 2024, smb.museum
Supply: Wallpaper
