The Exhibition Une musique intérieure questions our conduct, our language, and our voice as one would the balance of our inner ear; as instruments that stabilise our intimate relationship with the outside world.
The performance of Solo - Nature Study Notes - 1969-2019 [Athens Version] 2021, which marks the beginning of this presentation in the Basque Country following the performance in Athens, questions the relationship between individual and collective memory from a new angle for the Donostia-San Sebastian iteration. The performative device, augmented by the presence of other works and artists' interventions, involves the audience in its relationship to its own inner music. The itinerancy of this collective work becomes the lever to problematise the framework of its reception.
The exhibition at Tabakalera calls on the scores of composers who were pioneers in their attention to contexts, such as Alvin Lucier (Chambers, 1968), Pauline Oliveros (Deep Listening, 1989), and Milan Adamčiak (Floor scores, 1967). As Erik Satie already emphasised in his Musiques d'ameublement (Carrelage phonique, 1917), interiority is colonised by social rules. It is the political level of determinism and the instrumental character—in the double sense of musical instrument and tool of manipulation— that artists, such as local artist Amable Arias or a new generation of artists such as Eva Barto, Mattin, Matthieu Saladin, and Cally Spooner, specify in this exhibition which is offered to the public as a chamber music concert.
The exhibition Une musique intérieure (Inner Music) is the new framework for the score Solo - Nature Study Notes - 1969-2019 [Athens Version] performed in collaboration with Georgia Sagri, Delia Gonzalez and Serapis Maritime in early summer 2021. This score was written in Greece using freely available improvisation rites (prose instructions) exercising the open resource principle of the 1960s English collective, The Scratch Orchestra. The outline of the exhibition’s floor plan at the Hot Wheels gallery in Athens, where this work was first exhibited, is superimposed onto the Tabakalera space. Moreover, the clothing designed for the performance is printed with images from the Greek gallery and verbal instructions of the rites by Serapis Maritime. Solo - Nature Study Notes - 1969-2019 [Athens Version] 2021 seeks to interrogate the relationship between the individual and the collective. The score aims to gather the activation of different rites through the clothing worn by one person (a solo performer) who animates the instructions, thereby shifting the construction of the social body onto the somatic formation of the individual. On the other hand, the audience (a collective) is then placed in free circulation around this activation so that the group is more affected in its active listening or passive behaviour.
Curator: Pierre Bal-Blanc in conversation with Oier Etxeberria.
Participant artists: Milan Adamčiak, Amable Arias, Eva Barto, Delia Gonzalez, Daniel Grúň, Alvin Lucier, Mattin, Pauline Oliveros, Georgia Sagri, Matthieu Saladin, Erik Satie, Scratch Orchestra, Serapis Maritime, Cally Spooner and Vier5.
FOTO: SOLO - NATURE STUDY NOTES - 1969-2019 [ATHENS VERSION] 2021, performance by Georgia Sagri during the live exhibition curated by Pierre Bal-Blanc with Delia Gonzalez, Serapis Maritime presented at Hot Wheels Athens, June 11, 2021; photo by Stathis Mamalaki.
