Empty Act was a collective collaboration with Angeliki Athanasiadou (architect), Ioannis Kotsonis (musician) and Danae Stefanou (musician), culminating in the creation of a sound installation: a sonic reading of Stephane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard . . .”.

Borrowing the idea of the constellation from Mallarmé, segmented readings of the poem are interspersed in the exhibition space creating a porous, transient spatial experience, almost never there to begin with, but at times impossible to ignore. As the poem uses different typeface settings to inject more and more layers of complex non-sequiturs between its scattered main verses, the installation makes use of a series of concrete yet semantically ambiguous vocal sonorities, and includes a sonic “vortex”, a kind of black hole which swallows all meaningful elements and turns the verbal aspect of reading into a purely spatial entity.

It also introduces the idea of chance as a slow-burn catalyst, splitting a four-channel output into two CD-players, each playing at increasingly different speeds. Thus, every repeat will incur different synchronizations between the two pairs of speakers, which gradually veer away from each other temporally, only to return to a synchronized state and start their course anew, after a certain number of repetitions.

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Location: La Cathedral Studios, Dublin

Part of "Despite my good intentions, A wander beyond" exhibition curated by Michelle Phelan & Caoimhe Killfeather

Collaborators: Angeliki Athanasiadou, Danae Stefanou, Ioannis Kotsonis