Past exhibition at Lumiar Cité:

Florian Hecker
Articulação
25.09 - 25.11.2012

Info
Press-Release (port)
Press-Release (eng)
Exhibition View
Seminar

Florian Hecker (1975) lives and works in Kissing (Germany) and Vienna. Notable among his numerous solo and collective exhibitions and performances are: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; Nouveau Festival, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (all, 2012); Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (Sweden, 2011, 2003); Push and Pull, A two-day performance event, Tate Modern, London (2011); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Germany, 2010) and No night No day, in collaboration with Cerith Wyn Evans, 53 Venice Biennale (Italy, 2009). In addition Hecker has an extensive discography with works released on labels such as Editions Mego, Pan, Presto?!, Rephlex, Warner Classics and Warp.

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In his installations, performances and publications, Florian Hecker explores specific compositional developments of post-war modernity and electroacoustic music, as well as extra-musical disciplines. Hecker dramatizes space, time and self-perception by isolating specific auditory events in their singularity, thus stretching the boundaries of their materialization.

For the occasion of his exhibition at Lumiar Cité, Hecker produced Hinge, a text sound piece, featuring an experimental libretto by the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani. Hinge is a sequel to Chimerization, a work that Hecker presented at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (Germany). The piece deepens their investigations on universalism, synthesis and decomposition and the chimeras of nature and culture in the form of a topological fable.

The libretto, originally written in English, was translated into Portuguese and five speakers recite the texts individually inside an anechoic chamber, a hermetic space that prevents most audible reflections within it. Hecker subjected these recordings to careful psychoacoustic processing, twisting and swapping particularities of the voices and further electroacoustic components.

As Magnus Schäfer observes: ‘The speakers’ renditions of the text, which vary in speed, intonation and other individual qualities of the voice, are layered and modulated by an additional sound track. The result is a swirling stream, in which words and sounds seem to shift perpetually from one voice to the next. The voice, while originally connected to the body that produced it, is thus transformed into a chimera – present, yet only existing in an acoustic space, on the verge of dissolving words into texture, bodily trace into disembodies vibration.’

In addition to the exhibition at the Lumiar Cité space, the artist’s work is also presented as a performance in the Lisbon University Botanical Garden on 25 September 2012.

Hecker characterizes Chimerization as a concept derived from psychoacoustic research on difficult-to-define areas of language and non-language, with its different notions that enable us to think about sound. In Hecker’s work, it stands for the process of decomposition of sound and ‘synthesizing incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them’ (Robin Mackay) in order to obtain a narration beyond immediate comprehension, an abstract sound event in space which a listener may decipher through repeated, ‘active’ listening.

As a prelude, web versions of Chimarization can be dowloaded via http://chimerization.documenta.de/

Coproduction by Maumaus and Goethe-Institut Portugal, in partnership with the Maumaus Residency Programme and Festival Cantabile 2012. A collaboration with CAPS – Instituto Superior Técnico, the Jardim Botânico da Universidade de Lisboa and Meyer Sound.