Vertical Migration
Unsettling our perceptions of scale and otherness, Vertical Migration is an intimate encounter with a life form that bears no resemblance to human beings, though we share a planet, an ecosystem, and a future. Because of sea-level rise, humans will also be migrating vertically in the coming centuries, to higher elevations and raised buildings. The siphonophore’s story is our story. Though we can never experience its journey through the pitch-black ocean depths, we can shift our perspective to recognize that we’re connected, that our actions affect each other, and that we share a common fate.

Vertical Studies
Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections; Water Tower Sint Jansklooster In their new collaborative work, Vertical Studies: Acoustic Shadows and Boundary Reflections, Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer invite participants on a journey to a 46-metre-high abandoned water tower in Sint Jansklooster. The tower has been re-imagined as a vertical field-lab where Lidén and Sommer discuss their ongoing research into connections between sound, history, wind and weather. To this end they have constructed a range of special instruments to record and playback sounds in the vertical dimension. The participants on this journey will experience live outdoor vertical studies and a vertical soundscape shaped by Eide and Lidén that ascends the tower’s spiral staircase.

Counterweight project
Tethered to either end of a single rope that goes over the top of this tall thin building, movement in this vertical house for two depends on using the body mass of one’s roommate as a counter weight to aid ascent or slow descent. When one occupant wishes to go up to the kitchen at the top level, the other must go down to the bathroom at the bottom. Between these two rooms are two private sleep / work rooms on levels two and four, and a common room at level three where the ends of the rope meet. Counterweight Roommate was continuously inhabited for five full days of Scope Basel in 2011 by performance-architecture artists Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, and acquired in 2015 by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Vertikal
“Pour cette nouvelle création, je désire aborder un nouvel espace, celui de la verticalité. À travers un dispositif proposé par la compagnie Retouramont et Benjamin Lebreton, et accompagné d’une dizaine de danseurs au plateau je me confronterai à un environnement où le mouvement se joue de la gravité.”more…