Tracks

In the ballroom of Ceaucescu’s palace

Using text and sound, the Croatian Barbara Matijević and the Italian Giuseppe Chico offer an associative, personal view of their 1989. Their material consists of authentic and fictional audio documents either made in 1989 or related to it by content: pop songs, the Eurovision Song Contest – in 1989 won by Yugoslavia! – excerpts from radio and TV shows, initial attempts at ‘computer voice synthesis’, private recordings and so on. The place in which the sound was recorded is equally important. After all, a sentence does not sound the same when spoken in a bunker as it does in the ballroom of Ceaucescu’s palace or in a concert stadium.

Whereas the present pieces concentrates on sound, the first part of this trilogy, which focused on 1984, revolved around drawings. The drawings on white boards were a blueprint, a mental ground plan and a labyrinthine diagram, and they were equally keys, instructions and feelings.

In this second part, Matijević and Chico study the dramaturgy of sound resonances in order to gain access to mental, imaginary and historical spaces and buildings. Every space does after all have its own frequency. Everything that vibrates between 20 Hz and 20 kHz produces sound. In 1978, Dr David Kemp pressed his ear to a microphone and was the first to realise that even the ear produces its own sound.