Rapture

source: kongehusetno

Det er den amerikanske lydkunstneren Camille Norment som står bak det norske bidraget til biennalen denne gang, og omtaler prosjektet “Rapture” som “en stedsspesifikk, skulpturell og sonisk installasjon”.

Kronprinsesse Mette-Marit hadde æren av å holde åpningstalen i ettermiddag, og framhevet hvordan prosjektet utforsker forholdet mellom lyd, kropp og sinn:

– The work Rapture by multi-media artist Camille Norment brings together many elements: sculptural, architectonic, performative and sonic. It explores the relationship between sound and the human body. It immerses the visitor in a multi-sensory experience. Through her work, we are asked to consider the impact sound has on our bodies – on our lives. Rapture reminds us that sound is a strong mediator of cultural experience and identity. Sound is a gateway to knowledge and an instrument of power. Sound is a source of pain and joy, and has been used in markedly different ways – in different societies and at different times.

Norment (f.1970) er kunstner, musiker, komponist og skribent, bosatt i Oslo.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: emisferioboreal

Y también algo prohibido (e invisible) nos enseña la noruega de ascendencia norteamericana Camille Norment, cuya obra “Rapture” (que traducimos como arrebato, éxtasis) ocupa todo el espacio del Pabellón Nórdico situado en los Giardini di Castello venecianos. Se trata de una instalación artística en la que lo fundamental son los sonidos que reproducen diferentes dispositivos distribuidos por toda la sala. La pieza sonora de la que pueden disfrutar los visitantes es una composición musical interpretada por la propia Norment con una armónica de cristal. Este llamativo instrumento, uno de los menos conocidos del mundo, fue ideado por Benjamin Franklin en el siglo XVIII tras asistir a un concierto de música con copas de vino en Cambridge.

Esta peculiar armónica se compone de platos de diferentes tamaños atravesados por un eje al que el intérprete hace girar con un pedal. Con los dedos mojados de sus manos en contacto con los platos, el músico crea melodías con sonidos cristalinos. El instrumento tuvo su éxito, e incluso llamó la atención de Mozart que lo empleó para uno de sus adagios. Sin embargo, poco después su uso fue prohibido en muchos lugares por considerarse que tocarlo producía cáncer y saturnismo. Y escucharlo, según las autoridades del momento, podía llevar al éxtasis, que en el caso de las mujeres se convertía en placer sexual. Supuestamente, su sonido además asustaba a los animales, adelantaba los partos e incitaba a la locura.

En su instalación multisensorial de la Bienal, Camille Norment pretende estudiar qué sensaciones produce en los asistentes la reproducción de ese sonido musical antaño prohibido, en una interesante interacción entre arquitectura, espacio, arte, sonido y el propio cuerpo humano. Aquí puedes ver a la artista noruega interpretando una pieza de armónica de cristal en el Pabellón Nórdico de Venecia.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: normentnet

Rupture bursts with the potential of rapture. The ‘Rapture’ project sits with the crossroads of historical trajectories and a zeitgeist reflection upon the current tension of changing and uncertain times. The calmness of the installation environment is itself an enveloping meditation upon the many narratives it houses. Emerging through histories of sound and the body, censorship and repression, national identity, the current suspense of the unknown future in the devastating face of change, Rapture is a state of excitation.
Rapture relates the quivering of sympathetic vibrations to the tremors of shock waves in a phenomenological and socio-political reflection upon the body and mind’s relationship to trauma, ecstasy and the state of becoming. The body of the pavilion itself is subject to this experience, allowing visitors to witness, and enter within a body suspended in a state of excitation.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: designboom

camille norment has realized a site-specific installation within the nordic pavilion at the venice art biennale 2015. ‘rapture’, curated by katya garcía-antón, unfolded during the opening days of the international art exhibition as a set of performances by musicians and vocalists at specific times; and a three-part publication which explores the relationship between the human body and sound, through the visual, the sonic and the architectural body.

the oslo-based artist works with the glass armonica – an 18th-century instrument invented by benjamin franklin that creates ethereal music from the touch of fingers on glass and water – and a chorus of 12 female voices. weaving these elements together within the pavilion itself, norment creates an immersive, multi-sensory space, which reflects upon the history of sound, contemporary concepts of consonance and dissonance, and the water, glass and light of venice.

norment comments, ‘I am interested in how music has long been used to facilitate both the forging and transgressing of cultural norms. sound permeates all borders. throughout history, fear has been associated with the paradoxical effects music has on the body and mind, and its power as a reward-giving de-centralizer of control. recognized as capable of inducing states akin to sex and drugs, music is still seen by many in the world as an experience to be controlled – especially in relation to the female body – and yet it is also increasingly used as a tool for control under the justification of war’.

‘rapture’ reflects on how the body can be defined and potentiated by sound, with the pavilion speaking of the tensions between harmony and dissonance. if, as the norwegian experimental composer arne nordheim said, ‘music lives in the span between poetry and catastrophe’, the visitor to the nordic pavilion walks into a sculptural and sonic installation torn between these two ideas, a space between a body in trauma and a body in rapture.

spanning performance, installation, drawing and sound, norment’s work explores how the body is connected through sound with our environment, contemplating the power of dissonance and its ability to carve out a space for new, affirmative thinking. ‘camille norment is one of the most exciting artists working in norway today, creating work to be experienced viscerally and poetically. her practice is unusual in that it crosses the fields of art and music, mining historical and sonic dichotomies to trace unresolved social dialogues that continue today‘, says katya garcía-antón, curator of the nordic pavilion at the venice biennale 2015.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: normentnet

The body is a site where various forms of knowledge converge. This knowledge is a manifestation of the information that the body has gathered, conscious and unconsciously, in a reckoning with its sensory experiences, creating our sensory knowledge spaces. These spaces situate themselves like a reality extracted from science-fiction and placed into our realm to tell its version of our stories.

Multi media artist Camille Norment often uses the notion of cultural psychoacoustics as both an aesthetic and conceptual framework. She defines this term as the examination of socio-cultural phenomena through sound and music, and the contexts in which they are produced. She applies this concept towards the creation of critical works that consciously interweave the formal and the contextual.

Her artwork utilizes forms including sound, installation, light sculptures, drawing, performance, and video, all united by a preoccupation with the way in which form, space, and the body of the viewer create aesthetic and conceptual experience. She seeks to engage the viewer as a physical and psychological participant in the work and as such, is interested in creating experiences that are both somatic and cognitive. While highly concerned with aesthetic experience, the work simultaneously spans the thresholds of the social and the political, often utilizing specific cultural symbols as ‘quiet’, but potent elements in the work. Her investigations do not reflect the boundaries of a singular cultural agenda or perspective, but rather the pressing through of intersections and contradictions from various cultural realms. As such, a singular element specifically charged in one context is expanded to reveal a macrocosm of contextual interpretations. Ambivalent cultural memories are condensed into physical, spatial, and temporal experiences that have the hallucinatory qualities of psychological atmospheres.

Camille performs as a solo artist, with other musicians in selected projects, and with her ensemble, the Camille Norment Trio. She assembled the ensemble consisting of electric guitar, Norwegian hardingfele, and the rare glass armonica, to explore the instruments’ collective sensual and cultural psychoacoustics, across genre boundaries. Sonic dissonance, and forms of cognitive dissonance are current motifs she uses to draw an audience into the experience of the work, by creating and revealing various perceptual sonic, and socio-cultural tensions.
Each of the instruments were simultaneously revered and feared or even outlawed at various points in their histories. Through deconstructions of ‘beauty’ and ‘noise’, ‘harmony’ and ‘dissonance’, the visceral atmospheres they produce resonate through a tantalizing union of the instruments’ voices and their paradoxical cultural histories.

Norment was selected to produce a solo project for the Nordic pavilion in the Venice Biennial, 2015.
Amongst several permanent public artworks, Norment was commissioned a permanent sound installation for the Henie Onstad Art Center (2011). The extensive international fine arts exhibition credits also include: exhibition and performance in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); a commissioned artwork and performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Liste Young Art Fair (2009); the Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; the Charlottenborg Fonden, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; UKS Gallery, Oslo, Norway; the Bildmuseet, in Umeå, Sweden, and radio broadcast in the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy. Norment’s work has been written about in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, Kunst Kritikk, Aftenposten, a feature in The Wire Magazine, and numerous other international texts.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
source: lifehaibao

Camille Norment在2015年威尼斯艺术双年展北欧馆内完成一件选址特殊的装置作品。作品《兴高采烈 (Rapture) 》由Katya García-Antón策展，将在国际艺术博览会开幕式当天以表演的形式向观众呈现，且由音乐家和歌唱家在某一特定时刻联合演出。作品由三个部分组成，通过结合画面、声音和建筑结构一同探索了人类肉体和灵魂间的关系。该奥斯陆艺术家将玻璃琴融入创作中。玻璃琴是一种在十八世纪由本杰明·富兰克林 (Benjamin Franklin) 发明的乐器，其原理是通过触摸玻璃和水而发出空灵的声音。艺术家的创作还融入了一个有12名女声的合唱团。Norment将这些元素都聚集到展馆内，创造出一个笼罩式的多重感观空间，借此反映了声音的历史、一致和不一致的现代概念、水、玻璃以及威尼斯的光。