01 / Experience
An exhibition that listens across time.
Music for Diary is Mario García Torres’s museographical essay about Conlon Nancarrow, a composer whose unusual methods challenged the limits of musical performance. The installation brought original papers, reproductions and sound into an exhibition environment for the 8th Berlin Biennale.
Rather than presenting a life only through documents, the exhibition invited visitors into a media landscape. Historical material and a contemporary composition placed Nancarrow’s practice in a new spatial and temporal context.
- Year
- 2014
- Location
- Ethnologisches Museum Berlin / 8th Berlin Biennale
- My contribution
- Interior Design, Production, Production Controlling, On-Site Coordination
- Artistic authorship
- Mario Garcia Torres, Nils Frahm
- Commissioner
- Gallery Neugerriemschneider
- Context
- Commission / studio collaboration
The exhibition environment and its sound equipment. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg.
02 / My contribution
Designing and delivering the exhibition environment.
As part of FELD Studio, I worked on interior design, production, production control, and on-site coordination. These responsibilities connected the arrangement of the exhibition with the practical work of making and installing it.
The project was realised with Mario García Torres and gallery neugerriemschneider, with musical arrangement by Nils Frahm. My role supported the physical setting through which visitors encountered the documents, objects and sound.
Interior
Develop the spatial and physical sound exhibit.
Production
Coordinate making and production progress.
Site
Bring the components together at the museum.
03 / Sound & duration
A composition lasting the length of the Biennale.
Nils Frahm rearranged Nancarrow’s previously unheard stock percussion recordings into a composition spanning the nine-week Biennale. Tape players, amplifiers and speakers became part of the installation’s physical language.
That duration changes the role of the visitor’s encounter. A visit reveals one part of a much longer composition, while the surrounding exhibition materials place the sound in relation to the composer’s methods and history.
The arrangement of tape players, amplifiers and speakers. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg.
04 / Production
The working objects behind the exhibition.
The components were assembled in the in-house workshop before installation. Custom-made tape player housings and cable management defined the sound objects of the exhibition space.
The transition between these scales was part of my production and coordination role: individual elements had to become a coherent exhibition environment at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin-Dahlem.
Workshop assembly of components for the exhibition.
05 / Context
Music, documents and a place to encounter them.
Presented from May to August 2014 at the 8th Berlin Biennale, Music for Diary connected a rediscovery of Nancarrow’s archive with a contemporary sound installation.
The exhibition design provided the setting in which historical evidence and a newly arranged composition could be experienced together. The physical details of presentation were part of how that relationship reached an audience.
Tape Mechanism detail. Photograph: Torsten Posselt
Four-channel sound installation. Photograph: Torsten Posselt
Further reading