What happens when sounds from the past touch the present?
This is the question that the ifa Gallery Stuttgart addresses in the Resonaciones project. For this presentation at ifa Gallery Stuttgart the two Chilean artists Nicole L'Huillier and Francisca Gili have reactivated whistling vessels from the Andean Moche culture held in the Stuttgart Linden Museum. Sound and music played an important role in Moche culture, and the two artists combine the centuries-old technology of whistling vessels from the Andes with today’s technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI). The project wishes to provide an impulse to ask and reframe questions about the colonial past, the present and the future.
Resonaciones began with a visit by the two artists to the Stuttgart Linden Museum collections in June 2023. The museum had acquired the whistling vessels at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Moche, who lived between 200 and 900 A.D. on the desert coast at the north of today’s Peru, created a culture in which sound and tonality were central. Instruments like the whistling vessels were understood to be able to communicate with non-human beings, as they created sounds that were unpleasant to the human ear. Although these sound-producing vessels are found today in museum collections all around the world, we know very little about their meaning and symbolism.
For this project, working under the guidance of Karen Urcia, a Mochica healer and cultural activist, six Moche whistling vessels from the Linden Museum collection were reactivated using sound, breath and touch. The title of the project, Un abrazo para despertar – An Embrace to Awake, is a reference to this process. For Karen Urcia, the encounter with the objects and their reactivation was also a meeting with her Moche ancestors and their stories, memories and energies. The two artists Nicole L'Huillier and Francisca Gili recorded the tones and sounds of the whistling vessels with contact microphones and antennae, and then incorporated them in their own artistic process.
The exhibition combines sound systems, new sound sculptures, and drawings and prints within an immersive soundscape. This is a dynamic and permanently changing archive, controlled by AI, into which new sounds are fed, leading to new sound experiences. The tones and sounds originate in different times and places. They comprise the sounds of the centuries-old whistling vessels, the vibrations of earthquakes, the sound of flowing water, and the voices of visitors to the exhibition. Our understanding of time and being is thus seen as something dynamic, based on mutual influence and reciprocity (according to Karen Barad intra-accion) which is the basis of all existence.
The soundscape at ifa Gallery Stuttgart is accompanied by a documentary space presenting visual and video material of the moment of the encounter with the whistling vessels in the Linden Museum as well as the processes of activation and recording.
Resonaciones is presented in cooperation with the Linden Museum Stuttgart and the 16 Bienal de Artes Mediales Santiago de Chile.
The exhibition is also presented as part of the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Galleries 2023 programme, in which the two galleries in Berlin and Stuttgart have been focusing on the themes of sound and earth. This is the final exhibition in this series at ifa Gallery Stuttgart.
Artistic and curatorial ensemble:
Nicole L’Huillier (artist), Francisca Gili (artist and anthropologist), Carolina Arévalo (curator), Bettina Korintenberg (curator)
Guided by Karen Urcia Arroyo (Mochica healer and cultural activist)
With contributions by Gabriel Rossell Santillán (artist), Luis A. Muro Ynoñán (archaeologist),
Manaswi Mishra (artist and researcher)
Together with Bienal de Artes Mediales, Santiago de Chile
Partner: Linden-Museum Stuttgart
Opening
16 November 2023, 19:00
Sound Waves: Transoceanic Invocations
Coming together through sounds in the ifa courtyard
Brief introduction to the exhibition in the ifa Gallery with the curators and artists
DJ Set, 20:30
FLAVE
Theory (LAFmusik)
Expanded Ontologies
Lecture Performance with Francisca Gili, Nicole L’Huillier, Karen Urcia
in English
Saturday 18 November 2023, 19:00
Linden Museum Stuttgart
In a lecture performance the two artists Francisca Gili and Nicole L’Huillier present insights into their experimental artistic approach to reactivating and recording the sound frequencies and traces of the lives of these clay beings.
Field Notes of the Planetary: Waterscapes
Film screening
Rose Lowder, La Source de la Loire, 16mm, 2021, 19 min
Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Waterfall, 16mm, 1984, 17 min
Saturday 20 January 2024, 17 – 18:30
This year’s edition of Field Notes of the Planetary focuses on the idea of “waterscapes.” The 16mm projection La Source de la Loire (2021) by French-Peruvian artist Rose Lowder explores the course and source of the river Loire. This is followed by the film Waterfall (1984) by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (ifa is screening a very rare copy), which creates a hypnotic space based on the ever-shifting shapes of water.
Followed by an open conversation in the exhibition gallery with Florian Fischer (film curator) and Bettina Korintenberg (exhibition curator).
In collaboration with 37. Stuttgarter Filmwinter
Healing, Decoloniality and Relational Aesthesis
Lecture in English by Rolando Vázquez
Friday 9 February 2024, 18:30 – 19:00
Preceded by a Listening Session with Nicole L’Huillier, 17:00 – 18:00
A lecture on decolonial art practice that engages with worlds that have been silenced, bringing them back into the memorial present, rendering their silences and voices present again.
Listening Session
Friday 9 February 2024, 5–6 pm, with Nicole L’Huillier
A listening session in which an AI system combines sounds from the whistling vessels with the sounds from earthquake data from the Andes, of local rivers, the voices of visitors to the exhibition, and other sound fabrics to create an imaginary soundscape and new listening experiences.
ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen is an intermediary and protagonist that uses its networks, projects, and research to promote freedom in art, civil society, and science all over the world. ifa creates analogue and digital spaces for encounters, exchange, and co-creation. ifa supports artistic and cultural exchange in exhibition, dialogue, and conference programmes, and it acts as a centre of excellence for international cultural and educational policy. ifa is part of a global network and relies on sustainable, long-term partnerships. ifa is supported by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, the state of Baden-Württemberg and its capital Stuttgart.
The ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Galleries in Stuttgart und Berlin present contemporary art in a global perspective, addressing post-colonial movements and artistic reflections on the themes of migration, the environment and cultural transfer. The work of the ifa Galleries is based on seeing the world from a diversity and plurality of perspectives, discovering new stories, and shaping emancipatory processes, interactions, and artistic spaces. Our focus is on long-term relationships with artists, partners, and visitors, and our exhibitions and education programmes are developed through practices of collaboration that trace global entanglements and piece them together in new forms of narrative.
