I assumed that I would turn back and go home here, at the place where the path had become impassable, but somebody had repaired it. The boggy trenches had been filled with broken pottery and I recognized it, bottle-green tiles and other shards with brown, cream, navy blue patterns. The china clay crunched under my feet.
from Daisy Hildyard ‘Emergency’ Fitzcarraldo Editions 2022
A limited edition double LP with original works by Eraldo Bernocchi + Maurizio Bianchi + Barbara Ellison + Terence Hannum + Ji Youn Kan + Fani Konstantinidou + Yannis Kyriakides + Andy Moor + Moor Mother + Massimo Pupillo + Scanner (Robin Rimbaud). Based on an original idea by Andrea Stillacci, co-curated with Unsounds. About the many forms and meanings that the sound of applause can take according to its context. CLAP. An Anatomy Of Applause Unsounds cat n. 69U, 2022.
Design d’une série de K7 en hommage à la compositrice Eliane Radigue. Volumes 4, 5 et 6, 2022 (la série comprendra 10 volumes) – Label Moving Furniture Records, Amsterdam.
Data seems free flowing and immaterial yet it is embedded in our physical world and has an immense impact on our environment. Data has become an indispensable tool for the circulation of goods world-wide and huge physical systems are activated when we use it. As individuals using data in our daily lives, we participate in highly complex, compartimentalized systems that are difficult to comprehend. Cargo of Clouds, by Isabelle Vigier and Anne La Berge reflects on this urgent topic.
Research on data centers and data farm locations around the globe shows that the data industry is tightly connected to the existing infrastructures of industry and commercial transport. The artists Anne La Berge and Isabelle Vigier have based Cargo of Clouds in the port of Venlo in the Netherlands, one of the important ports in Europe where large amounts of goods are transported daily in connection with the word-wide network of commerce and industry. Around the city of Venlo, like everywhere around Europe, historically agricultural landscapes are being reclaimed to make way for huge zones dedicated to the ever-growing infrastuctures of capitalism.
In Cargo of Clouds, the artists present an ambivalent image of a landscape that is the product of a society highly dependent on data, and deeply materialistic. Central to the story is the question of our involvement as individuals in systems that we do not control or comprehend, but that have a profound impact on the world, and nature around us.
Stills from the 3 screens
THE INSTALLATION
The installation with 3 screens and quadrophonic sound combines powerful visual and sonic images. The total sequence of 15 minutes is looped, so that the projection is on-going. The arrangement in the exhibition space allows for the public to circulate amidst the work, and take in the relationships between images, sound and space. Visitors may come and go at any time.
THE STORY
In the video tryptich, a character (dancer Valentina Campora) finds herself lost in industrial spaces, whereas in reality, the industrial zone is strictly forbidden for pedestrians. It is as if she has been transported from her personal screen, her interface with the world, into the high security apparatus that is hiding behind it. She has landed into a world on a non-human scale as a contemporary Alice in Wonderland. Meanwhile, containers are being shifted by cranes, moving weightlessly against the sky in a never-ending cycle. The quadrophonic sound creates a larger than life impression where nature and machine sounds co-exist.
Impression of the installation
Cargo of Clouds By Isabelle Vigier and Anne La Berge was filmed on location at the industrial port of Venlo, NL. It was produced by the artists with the Volsap Foundation. The project was made with the assistance of a powerful team of the artists’ choice: sound designer Alex Booy, drone camera operator and technician Paul Beumer, dancer Valentina Campora and code developer Timo Hoogland.
Cargo of Clouds was made with generous support from Stimulerings Fonds, Prins Bernhard Fonds, Fonds Podium Kunsten, Norma Fonds. We also benefited from a residence with Intro InSitu, in Maastricht, and practical assistance from Splendor, Amsterdam. We are grateful for their support.
Safe Piece (installation)was a special phase of the project of the same name, which started with a series of performances and was captured in a film (2019). Safe Piece was presented as an installation for the first time in Utrecht, centering on a selection of video stills by Isabelle Vigier and a soundscape made in collaboration with Andy Moor.
When her first child was seven months old choreographer Valentina Campora started a series of performances where she, the father of the child, and the baby are performing together in front of a small audience. Isabelle Vigier documented the sessions on video over four years. The film Safe Piece shows the process of evolving an improvised dance piece through time. The family develops a non verbal language that allows them to be all at once within a multitude of polarized dimensions : private and public, playing and performing, working and mothering, caring and taking risks, improvising and creating choreography.
For Safe Piece (installation) prints and sounds from the film are assembled in the gallery space, laying out the resonances of bodies through motion, play, rest, and shifting moods.
Interview conducted by Marcelle Schots (excerpt) copyright Movement Exposed Gallery Space. Prints are for sale at the gallery and online.
