Red Forests and Blue Clouds

2022

8 channel sound installation

Duration: 28 minutes

(simultaneus playback of two scenarios. 7 minutes each)

July 2022 at Aichi Triennale 2022, Japan

December 2022 WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Project room, Brussels

Installation view at Aichi Triennale 2022, ©︎ Aichi Triennale Organizing Committee, Photo: ToLoLo studio

A sound installation, Red Forests and Blue Clouds was originally commissioned for Aichi triennale 2022 in Japan to be presented at the former Ichinomiya nursing school. Approaching the installation, one hears dialogue and descriptions of scenes involving various characters, including a man, a young girl, her mother, a nurse and someone who is evidently a patient, an elderly man and woman, and some children, spoken in subdued tones through speakers with a sense of “the unspoken” behind the audible sounds.

Red Forests and Blue Clouds explores, in abstract terms, the tension between “reality as data in visible form” conveyed through screens, manipulated by visual technology to present only what we want to see, and “reality as lived by flesh and blood bodies.” In satellite imaging utilizing invisible light wavelengths, forests are sometimes displayed in red and clouds in blue. If we attune our senses to the sound of the work, we can catch glimpses of everyday life during the pandemic and the outbreak of wars. This poses challenges to our lived reality, and to the imagination required to see through a world saturated with data and simulations.