RAIN ROOM & CLEPSYDRA / sound installations in collaboration with Pontus Pettersson
Hara Alonso was invited to participate with a work at Water @ Weld in 2021 and 2022, a mini-festival that explores one of the world’s most common and idiosyncratic materials, water. The festival is organized by the choreographer and artist Pontus Pettersson together with Weld and has as its starting point Pontus’ artistic research project All Departures Are Waves. The festival manifests a “half-way situation” of the ongoing research work and presents different aspects of the five sub-projects: Hydran, OMNI, SS20, Bodies of Water and Delta. The research work takes place between 2019 -2023 and focuses on the material, ecological, performative and ethical qualities that water can imply, as a vital part of all living things. The starting point and anchor for the entire project is the concept of Hydrofeminism, which was developed by the gender researcher Aistrida Neimanis. By looking at water, and perhaps also being water, we can find a new path for feminism as an overarching ethics and politics for all living things.
Rain room (2021)
Sound installation by Hara Alonso that offers an immersive physical experience of sound. We can understand sound as vibrations that move through space and transform it, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. This installation tries to split your body, dissolve it. Hara Alonso has used the sound of rain as a starting point to explore and recreate this natural phenomenon in a digital format. As a virtual amplifier, the rain begins to expand its boundaries, dancing against the laws of gravity, inside the bodies that visit the installation.
[set up] : 2 loudspeakers, one deck chair, a Bela microcontroller. The stereo field originally horizontal is transformed here into the vertical axe, creating the illusion of falling water from up to down.
Clepsydra (2022)
How can we create or strengthen our relationship with water today, in the midst of the Anthropocene and the global environmental catastrophe? As a common thing, as the fact that keeps us alive?
Hara Alonso and Pontus Pettersson have investigated the common space in an installation of gestures, sound and water. They have worked in parallel with score creation and scores, two important methods in Western contemporary music and dance.
Playing with the idea of a water clock, a clepsydra, we measure, we become, we are through time. Can our bodies become the basis for this investigation?
The installation is open one hour at a time. We go in together and you go out when you want. The installation is an idea for a communal event, a meditation course of some kind, or an hour-long musical jam, or just being with sound and silence together. Welcome into time, into our sound garden, and to take care of the room by giving your attention to the water.
[set up] : 4 condenser microphones, 1 contact microphone, quadrophonic system, 3 fountains, a tank, various objects.
hara alonso 