RAIN ROOM & CLEPSYDRA / 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) is a 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) is an interactive sound installation by Hara Alonso and Pontus Pettersson.
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.
As the final installment for Källan and Three Sisters, a dinner was hosted at a liminal space in Värtahamnen, Stockholm’s Royal Seaport. The site was currently being used to store infrastructure pipes for the future residents of the sustainable development – pipes that would carry the metabolised waste of future generations.
Taking inspiration from the writing of José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, the dinner aimed invited those who are working with development processes to consider the importance of hope in provoking radically alternative futures from the present. For each course of the dinner, Holly invited a special host to guide the diners through their gut based meal. This included dragking Herman Winters who served a hyper masculine smoothie, spiritual medium Ronnit Hasson who served a bone soup and contacted the spirits of the site to ask what hopes they had had for the future, queer sustainability researcher Alva Zalar who spoke about how a queer approach could change how we plan and architect firm Secretary who served a fermented tea in a style linking IV drips with sports equipment.
Secretary also designed the dinner table, ‘Gut Feeling’, and musician Hara Alonso installed a sound installation of 12 loudspeakers throughout the site.
CIRCUS MEETS VISUAL ARTS – interactive sound installation in collaboration with CirkusPerspektive (2020)
[set up] : 6 ultrasonic sensors, Arduino Mega & Supercollider.
During the Circus Year 2020, Gävle municipality is arranging a series of circus activities. In connection with this, Gävle Art Center has commissioned CirkusPerspektiv to create an exhibition and a program that explores the possibilities of a meeting between circus art and visual arts, Circus Meets Visual Arts.
Nycircus, or contemporary circus, provides space for collaborative processes, meetings between different disciplines and collaboration with the environment. The current pandemic and the climate crisis have raised an urgent need to reevaluate man’s relationship with the environment. Artist and curator Marie-Andrée Robitaille’s circus work is part of a process in which she explores the transition from a human-centered circus to another form, where forces that do not originate from humans are allowed to take place in the structure.
The exhibition consists of a number of works selected by Robitaille. Effective forms, structures, sounds and movements reflect states of crisis and human vulnerability: Bubbles in the form of dodecahedrons are reminiscent of viruses. The rescue blanket, which should protect against fire and cold, has been given a new, expressive shape. Foil pieces invite you to an airborne dance. Fenders created to absorb the kinetic energy of boats have become pendulums in an interactive sound installation.
Robitaille has played with the objects and transformed them into a poetic and soft resistance to the collective crisis we are now experiencing. She focuses on the dynamic relationship between different beings, elements, objects and human activity.
Curator and circus performer:
Marie-Andrée Robitaille
Cast:
Visual Artist: Rachel Wingfield
Sound design: Hara Alonso
Photo: Einar Kling Odencrants
Technique and manufacturing of objects: Eduardo Cardozo
The exhibition is a collaboration between Gävle Konstcentrum, Stockholm School of Art (SKH), Kristofferscenen and Cirkusperspektiv AB.
Hara Alonso 