Tarek Atoui Migrating Sounds
Until March 5th, 2023, the Mudam Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg will be presenting Waters’ Witness, a major installation by Tarek Atoui, a creator of instrument-artworks and sound environments. Marcella Lista
In Mudam’s Great Hall, Tarek Atoui’s installation Waters’ Witness consists of an itinerant sound composition devoid of any visibly recognisable amplification system. Wooden columns containing compost, black metal beams and blocks of raw marble outline a scattered topography. Within reach of cables, a whole generation of technical assemblies distils flows, absorbs liquids and disturbs the tranquillity of bodies of water. By turns, drip systems, air pumps and other kinetic elements produce micro-events within what is perceived as an interconnected circuit of impulses. Spectators must walk around, sit down, and bend towards the ground in order to fully apprehend the soundscape that emanates from each of these elements: a contrasting composition of more or less identifiable sources, which passes through these various materials and devices like so many filters or resonators. The exhibition presents the third iteration of an ongoing project, which began at the Fridericianum in Kassel in 2020 and continued at the Serralves Foundation in 2022, where Tarek Atoui conducted an aural survey of the major merchant ports around the world with the musician Eric La Casa: Athens, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Porto. Based on live local audio footage, in the tradition of field recordings, the work interweaves visual, musical and conceptual gestures which the artist has been developing over the past fifteen years.
METASTABILITY
Tarek Atoui was born in Beirut in 1980. At the age of 18, he arrived in France to study business, before switching to a musical practice. Already familiar with sampling from DJ culture and electronic improvisation, he enrolled in the electroacoustic workshop Césaré, Centre national de création musicale, which was created in Reims by the composer Christian Sebille, an intermediary for the musical avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s.Ten years later, he was the guest artistic director at STEIM in Amsterdam (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music), an institution entirely devoted to the invention of electro-acoustic instruments. Music as the working of an acoustic material through a concrete expanse of space appeared very early on in Tarek Atoui’s reflections. “Since studying electroacoustic music and sound art,” he says, “I have understood the practice of exhibiting forms of sound art in space, through the works of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis and Cornelius Cardew—composers who have broadened our understanding of composition and introduced elements of
time, space and chance, as well as graphic and generative elements.” (1) His work takes shape in this unfinished experimental space, which is perpetually under construction and constantly developing new instruments to rethink the potentialities of play, forms of address and the sharing of musical intent. In one of his first performances presented in the art world, Un-drum/ strategies of surviving noise, presented in the open air on the archaeological site of Darat el Funun at the 9th Sharjah Biennale in 2009, the artist mixed electronic sounds in an intense gestural language, using electromagnetic sensors that followed the movements of his hands. The work derives from his experience of the Lebanese war of July 2006, during which the artist was arrested and brutalised, partially losing his hearing in the left ear. From the outset, the dispersal of musical matter that characterises his work actively undermines the intelligibility of sound: listening is solicited and engaged as a political act.The design of electroacoustic instruments open to a wide variety of performers quickly became the basis of his work.
In 2012, he created The Metastable Circuit for Documenta 13. This technical device, designed for performance, combines electronic mixing and modulation tables with a tailormade computer programme. It makes it possible to compose live with tens of thousands of microsamples—sometimes reduced to 200
thousandths of a second—taken from tracks that the artist has been accumulating for years: pop songs, samples of field recordings and synthesised sounds. The notion of metastability, borrowed from chemistry, reflects the scale of an aesthetic system that uses inertia and durability to create what might be described as a “sound environment”: an acoustic continuum, syncretic in its very mass, where rapidly-absorbed disruptive events produce long-term transformations. Tarek Atoui conceives of his instruments as bodily entities, organisms capable of metabolising the anonymous plethora of found sounds and the one-off actions of his performers. Instruments, in other words, which are capable of facing up to the imponderable. Invitations extended to Tarek Atoui to explore musical archives gave him the opportunity to develop a meta-historical reflection. On and from Tarab, begun in 2011, draws from the largest collection of Arabic classical music—the collection of Kamal Kassar at the AMAR Foundation in Beirut. The sampling and reinterpretation of this corpus gave rise to sessions with musicians from jazz and other improvisational traditions. “I was not trying to revive a lost tradition,” Atoui says, “nor to make a statement about the history of the region.” (2) What interested him was the tradition of oral transmission of music which resists copyright and ownership by eschewing writing and notation. When he was invited to work with another historical object, the pioneering DIMI synthesiser invented by the Finnish designer Erkki Kurenniemi in the 1960s, the artist set up an interconnected circuit where the individual improvisations of four musicians dissolve into a single sound mass, making it impossible to distinguish any voice. In The Reverse Sessions and The Reverse
Collection, between 2014 and 2016, Atoui took an interest in the ethnographic collection of musical instruments held at the Dahlem Museums in Berlin. The artist subjected this corpus, which is steeped in Germany’s colonial history, to a series of displacements. Atoui first obtained permission to invite musicians to improvise collectively on these museum objects. Following the recorded concerts, the scores were written down, and these materials, derived from the original artifacts, were entrusted to instrument-makers in order to design new instruments.
INSTRUMENT-ARTWORK
From there, Atoui began the development of a manufactured instrumentarium, which hybridises electronic and acoustic elements on the basis of sounds whose origin is kept at a distance. The Organ Within, the Lithophane, the Pipe Koto, the Putin Trumpets, the Hybrid Wheel Violin, the Aquaflute, the Toui and other newly baptised instruments might be said to embody the transition of a contested heritage. Beyond the museum object, a living expression of the Dahlem collection can be restored to the community and put back into circulation in the world.This is the artist’s state of mind when he pursues his experimentation with materials and techniques from all ages to produce musical sounds.
Atoui pushes the work of metal, earth, wood and skin beyond normative instrumentmaking. Throwing a lump of clay against a bronze bell to capture its resonance, dripping enamel on the surface of a drum skin to shake up its frequency and timbre: such are some of the gestures which examine the infinite nuances that can creep into the encounter between action and matter. In WITHIN, a longterm research project he is undertaking with
Council (2013-2017), the artist gives the opportunity to deaf and hard of hearing communities to design specific instruments with him, in which low frequency effects and tactile and visual sensations play a major role. In general, this instrumentarium goes beyond the simple musical reappropriation of found objects—as performances by Fluxus historically proposed to do. Only a specific manufacturing process enables the artist to refine the acoustic parameters of the sound objects and, in his words, to “give them several functions in the same piece.” (3) Two of Tarek Atoui’s research projects converge in the Waters’ Witness project. The first concerns the collective instrument entitled I/E, which the artist designed in 2013 and has since developed in various contexts. The second takes the form of advanced research into sound conduction in the aquatic environment, undertaken as part of a workshop and exhibition entitled The Whisperers in 2021. I/E stands for “Inhale/Exhale.” This instrument-artwork inverts a certain tradition of electroacoustic music: instead of treating field recordings through the electronic manipulation of abstract sounds, as Pauline Oliveros did in the 1960s, Atoui produces a recording of ambient sounds which itself becomes a filter for other sounds. I/E begins in an industrial container installed in the public space, which was first presented on the Place du Carrousel du Louvre in 2013, then in Elefsina, the industrial port of Athens.This customised container becomes a tool and a cabin for recording, storing and playing in public. As a preamble to the performances, the acoustic environment of the container is sampled to constitute its sound portrait, which the music produced on site then passes through. “When we created this organism that inhales and exhales the sounds surrounding it,” the artist explains, “our dream was that it would wash up in a harbour to create a sound library. This was the idea of a sound synthesiser which would synthesise the concrete sounds of field recordings, instead of synthesising the abstract sounds of sinusoidal wave oscillators. On that basis, wooden boxes [also called I/E] were created, following the principle of pedals, of processors. Without making concrete music, the concrete sound served as a catalyst, a morpher or an envelope, which contained everything else. Even if instruments, electronic waves or more tonal things emerged, they appeared as the detail of a field recording.” Since then, these wooden boxes have become as many singular instruments. For example, I/E Elefsina presents a reverb box, using the acoustic characteristics of the Plu
tonian Cave near the port. I/E Abu Dabi is a distortion box, which cancels out spectra by subtracting one sound from another, etc. The wood used for each box also provides a commentary on the context: cedar from Lebanon for Abu Dhabi, a wood which was long imported to the Emirates before the current shortage, whereas the teak wood for Singapore refers to its use in piracy.
SOUND MATTER
In Waters’ Witness, concrete materials filter the sounds of five ports which have been recorded since 2015 by ambient and contact microphones and hydrophones. This library is divided into three types of sound: the mechanical sounds reflect the activity of machines, the sounds of voices reflect that of human presences, and the abstract sounds capture the resonances and reverberations of these activities in conductive elements such as water and metal. These three sets of sounds circulate by turn in two circuits which function in stereophony throughout the Great Hall of Mudam, starting from the columns of compost in which the sound is complexified by the presence of hydrophones and underwater speakers, before crossing the metal beams and marble blocks which are made to resonate by transducers. The sound matter, in the form of impulses, finally reaches the sculpture-fountains which add a concrete, acoustic music to the amplified musical envelope. “The materials are processing, they have a grain that is not at all that of computer software. The gesture is sculptural, for me, in the sense that sound sculpts matter.” The marble blocks were purchased near the port of Athens. The metal beams are generic beams used in ports and covered with paint that reacts to temperature, cut here in the proportions of a pentagram in order to harmonise the resonances. The compost columns are fed with vegetation from around Mudam. Instead of water flowing into the fountains, Atoui initially wanted to use the boat oil that covers the waters of Singapore: “the whole bay is oily, with hundreds of boats sometimes waiting weeks to enter the harbour and forming a block that saturates the horizon.” (4)
In a visual gesture, the presence of concrete materials extends Tarek Atoui’s musical concern for the social, economic and geopolitical environment. Strangely, the marble, metal, water and wood resonate with the mineral architecture of I.M. Pei at Mudam, as if imperceptibly dissolving its characteristic travertine blocks in sound and raw material. The operational interconnection of all the components of Waters’ Witness takes the idea of an instrument to a new scale. It suggests the interdependence of human actions in the exploitation of the planet’s resources through an instrumental writing which physically brings these very resources together. If water bears witness to global extraction, in Waters’ Witness, “we don’t know who is watching who.” The work reveals a multitude of elements in a state of uncertainty, questioning the roles of each and every one.
Tarek Atoui in “Interview: Tarek Atoui, Catherine Wood, Andrea Lissoni,” Tarek Atoui. The Reverse Sessions/The Reverse Collection, Mousse Publishing, 2017.
Ibid. Unless otherwise stated, the quotations are taken from the author’s interview with Tarek Atoui, January 15th, 2023. This idea could not be implemented at Mudam, where the floor is made of travertine.
Marcella Lista is an art historian and curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, where she is the head of the New Media collection.
Tarek Atoui Né en born in 1980 à in Beyrouth Vit et travaille à lives and works in Paris Expositions personnelles récentes Solo shows: 2022 Waters’ Witness, Fondation Serralves, Porto ;
The Whisperers, The Contemporary Austin ; The Whisperers, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York 2021 THE GROUND Sessions, Bourse de Commerce, Paris 2020 Waters’ Witness, Fridericianum, Cassel 2019 Organ Within, Kurimanzutto, New York
2018 I/E, Fondation Serralves, Porto Expositions collectives récentes Group shows: 2022 Biennale d’Istanbul ; Triennale de Guangzhou 2021 Biennale de Gwangju; Darmstädter Ferienkurse,
2020 Biennale de Sydney 2019 Infinite Ear, Centro Centro, Madrid ; Okayama Art Summit ; Inner Ear Vision, Bemis Center for
Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Biennale de Venise